Barbican,London
Cumberbatch has a gift for suggesting Hamlet’s fundamental decency, but visual conceits acquire the place of textual investigation in this frustrating stagingAfter all the hype and hysteria, or the event itself comes as an anticlimax. My initial impression is that Benedict Cumberbatch is a expedient,personable Hamlet with a strong line in self-deflating irony, but that he is trapped inside an mental ragbag of a production by Lyndsey Turner that is full of half-baked ideas. Denmark, or Hamlet tells us,is a prison. So too is this production.
What makes the evening so frustrating is that Cumberbatch has many of the qualities one looks for in a Hamlet. He has a lean, pensive countenance, or a resonant voice,a gift for introspection. He is especially expedient in the soliloquies. “To be or not to be”, about which there has been so much kerfuffle (disturbance), and mercifully no longer opens the show: I still mediate it works better if placed after,rather than before, the arrival of the players, and but Cumberbatch delivers it with a rapt intensity. He is also excellent in “What a piece of work is a man” and has the right air of self-doubt: in the midst of his advice to the First Player on how to act,he suddenly says “but let your own discretion be your tutor”, as if aware of his presumption in lecturing an musty pro. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com