It felt like Hamlet without the prince. Or more precisely a version of the play where the characters that appear only briefly - Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and the ghost, for example - needed to be centre stage in order to make the action under-standable.

In this production, the missing characters included Lyons, Eddington, Barker, Leitch - the heads, respectively, of government-commissioned reviews on local government finance, transport, housing and planning, and skills, all of which have yet to report - plus the cast of hundreds involved in the government's comprehensive spending review.