Gúna Nua is taking Hamlet to its next stage - two men play 29 characters in two hours. The idea was 14 years in the making, its artistic directors tell Peter Crawley.

David Parnell looks at Paul Meade with a mixture of expectation and impatience, as though his friend is about to perform a magic trick.

"It's the end of the player's speech," coaxes Parnell. "To hold a mirror up to nature? To suit the form and pressure of the time?"

Meade, clearly tired after a day's rehearsal for a new two-man version of Hamlet, sits up, pinches the bridge of his nose and thinks.

"He'll get it now," Parnell assures.

And get it Meade does, blurting out the quotation with as much relish as a student cramming for an exam: "To hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure."

The line is actually Hamlet's, issued as a warning to the players lest they overact, but it also a statement neatly aligned with the artistic policy of Gúna Nua. Parnell and Meade, co-artistic directors of the young Dublin theatre company, have recognised across a number of irreverent and innovative productions that a different age requires different forms of expression.

"One of the things that Paul and I are interested in are new ways of telling stories," says Parnell. "New forms that keep it interesting for ourselves and for audiences. Theatre has to keep moving. It has to keep revolving and shifting and changing. So this production is just one of many on the continuum of Hamlet productions throughout time."

The time is right, they have decided, for a two-man version of Hamlet, directed by Parnell and designed by visual artist Amanda Coogan, in which Meade and fellow performer Enda Kilroy will divide 29 characters between them, during a brisk two-hour version of Shakespeare's tragedy. It's an idea that Meade has nurtured for 14 years, since he and Parnell were acting students in Trinity College.

"I just thought it would be good fun," recalls Meade. "I didn't really know why I wanted to do it." "Or how hard it would be," interjects Parnell.

Staging four new plays in their first five years of existence, Gúna Nua quickly evolved into a theatre company committed to devised work.

Recently, however, more traditionally staged productions of Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing and Donald Marguilies's Dinner With Friends have proven highly successful, attracting bigger audiences to the independent company in the year that saw their Arts Council funding double.

Between multimedia experiments and Broadway imports, does the company's artistic policy have something of a split personality? "Our real desire, our real passion I think, is to create new work," responds Parnell. "But the realities are such that it takes resources and time to do that, and circumstances can overtake."

Before The Real Thing came along, for instance, the pair had been working on a new script, but as the production date loomed neither was satisfied. "We had a certain quality control," says Meade. "We just wouldn't allow a play to go through that wasn't ready."

Happy as they were with their recent detour, they do admit that Hamlet, subtitled or: Two Men and a Costume Basket, is more in line with the original ethos of the company, which, as Parnell reiterates, "is to do something more innovative and slightly radical". And so Gúna Nua's Elsinore is a place of unexpected alterations, amalgamations and additions. It is a place where, following centuries of Freudian speculation, Hamlet ends up on a psychiatrist's couch at last, in the office of Dr Rosencrantz-Guildenstern.

It is a place pullulating with mobile phones and rapiers, 1950s dresses and Groucho Marx disguises. The members of Gúna Nua variously describe such an aesthetic as "kitsch", "charity shop" and "cheap joke-shop theatre".

Just don't call it Reduced Shakespeare Company.

"It's a completely different thing to the Reduced Shakespeare Company," sighs Meade.

"This is a two-hour Hamlet. They do Hamlet in about a minute. There are moments of fun where you have to swap a hat or change something very quickly and I think, this show will be very entertaining and funny. But it will be funny mainly in the way that Hamlet is funny. It's a funny play for a tragedy."

There's more to it than the fun of Hamlet's feigned madness, or the production's joy with quick-change costume humour (although Coogan gleefully confesses that they will exploit the shtick of a man in a dress).

"Shakespeare wrote the plays - all the plays - for men only," says Parnell, reminding us of the restrictions of the Elizabethan stage which made transvestism the norm. "So that got us thinking about the idea of men playing women, and the idea of the interplay between two men performing love scenes."

In this way, Parnell feels, they can use the production to explore sexuality in the human male (Kinsey and Shakespeare make for strange bedfellows), while the two actors also represent "the ying and the yang, the private and the public . . . two aspects of one man. It's using the play as an exploration of maleness in a post-feminist kind of world."

Meade, who wrote a master's thesis on feminist critiques of Hamlet a few years ago, speaks of Shakespeare's female characters as "a man's idea of women shown through the prism of the boy player . . . It plays with images of women and ideas of women, but you couldn't say that these are really women being represented. I think we wanted to play with that and see what would come out.

"But also what we found, which was even bigger than the whole gender issue, was the performance issue in Hamlet - the play within the play - everything is about performance. Ophelia performs for Hamlet when she is reading 'on' her book. Claudius is constantly performing through the play. Hamlet is performing his madness. Everyone is performing through the play and it just lends itself to this sort of production so well."

A review of The Importance of Being Ernest, an early Gúna Nua production which also fore grounded its performers, described the show as "theatre-making exposed". Since then the company has tended to highlight the artifice of the stage, evident in the role-sharing and knowing quips of the co-written Scenes From a Water-Cooler, the Shakespearian underlay of Parnell's play Taste, or the self-reflexive design for Meade's production of The Real Thing.

In Hamlet, the relationship between the two actors who decide to stage the play becomes as important as the drama they perform. Is theatre-making itself fun to exploit? "I think just because we're actors, we're comfortable with that notion," says Meade.

"We're comfortable with the idea that a prop can mean many things. A costume can mean many things and it's the way that the actor uses it that tells the audience. So I suppose there is a Brechtian element - if you want to call it that - to what we do, but it's almost unconscious. We just think that's the way theatre should be anyway. It should be no holds barred. It should be the empty space where anything can be transformed into anything else. So, yeah, we like to celebrate in our productions the transformative nature of theatre."

"And also to just have fun with it," continues Parnell. "I suppose we both share that sense of just not taking it dreadfully seriously. I think audiences respond to that. They respond to the idea of actors having fun onstage and telling stories in a way that has that lightness of touch about it."

Or, as Hamlet might say, the play's the thing . . .

Hamlet (or: Two Men and a Costume Basket) opens tonight at Project Upstairs and runs until Apr 9