Though this be madness, yet there is method in it

Something is rotten in the state of … well, almost everywhere these days, which might account for the recent rush of Hamlet adaptations, with an anime version (Scarlet), a documentary version (King Hamlet), an origin story (Hamnet), and even Grand Theft Hamlet, a version set inside a video- game.

This new reworking places Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy among contemporary London’s South Asian business elite, and the results are sometimes electrifying, sometimes frustrating but always intensely watchable, thanks to an intimate and anguished central performance by Riz Ahmed (The Sound of Metal).

Setting Shakespeare’s language against modern trappings can be tricky — this is probably the first version of the melancholy prince who snorts cocaine — but director Aniel Karia (Surge) and scripter Michael Lesslie (who worked on a 2015 version of Macbeth) mostly handle the update in ways that feel urgent and alive.

Hamlet, having returned to England for his father’s funeral, finds his widowed mother, Gertrude (Bollywood actress Sheeba Chaddha), about to marry his uncle Claudius (Art Malik, the veteran British character actor last seen in The Woman in Cabin 10).