Benedict Cumberbatch in Hamlet at the Barbican, London: Selected Reviews

Benedict Cumberbatch in Hamlet, review: Pointedly subversive Prince lacks spontaneity

By Paul Taylor for The Independent, 25 August 2015

With his great gift for portraying the brilliant misfit and racing, ironic intellect, Benedict Cumberbatch is natural casting for Hamlet.  But I wonder if a bit of him now wishes that he’d tackled the part at some point before the global success of Sherlock rocketed him into the celebrity stratosphere.

Lyndsey Turner’s production may be the fastest-selling show in London theatre history but the unprecedented degree of hype and hysteria it has generated has come at a price, with certain newspapers sneaking in to review the very first performance and with Cumber-fans having to be admonished about filming him on their mobile phones.

The principle that previews are a part of the artistic process, allowing theatre-makers to experiment and refine their work before the critics pass judgement, certainly needs to be respected.  After nearly three weeks of these (a period that seemed longer and more troubled than the Siege of Mafeking) the production has now officially opened. Has it been worth the wait?

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Review: Benedict Cumberbatch in ‘Hamlet’

By Ben Brantley for The New York Times, 25 August 2015

He is, he complains sulkily, “too much in the sun.” That is correct on so many levels.

When the title character of “Hamlet” offers this self-diagnosis early in the highly pictorial production that opened on Tuesday night at the Barbican here, the image matches the word. For the Prince of Denmark is at that moment standing at the exact center of a lavishly appointed banquet table. And while it is presumably nighttime, the sun’s rays seem to have followed him there, and haloed him.

It’s not just that he’s the only one wearing black, or scowling, that sets this guy apart. He is cocooned in his own special (and literal) radiance, the celestial equivalent of a spotlight devised by the lighting designer Jane Cox. He looks, for all the world, like a saint in an old-master painting, embracing both martyrdom and apotheosis.

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London Theater Review: Benedict Cumberbatch in ‘Hamlet’

By Matt Trueman for Variety, 26 August 2015

Thought you knew “Hamlet”? Think again. Benedict Cumberbatch’s prince might have triggered a media frenzy, but make no mistake, this is director Lyndsey Turner’s production — and it’s a radical reinvention with real political intent, even if it’s too complex to fully cohere. Its star defers to his director’s vision, probably to his own personal detriment: his Hamlet is many things at once, more a collection of characteristics than a credible character, but he finds his purpose as he goes on — as does the production. This is a Hamlet for a world on the edge: a warning from history, and a plea for new ideas from a new generation.

Cumberbatch begins as the Hamlet we know and expect: Hamlet the icon, hidden away in his room, dressed in black and brooding over his father’s death. (In early previews, he opened with “To be or not to be…”) He sits on the floor, staring into the distance, as Nat King Cole croons “Nature Boy” on vinyl, almost daring us to impose its pat moral — just to love yadda yadda — onto Shakespeare’s play.

Don’t succumb to that, whatever you do. Turner pushes against any such simplicity with a stark, self-aware edit of the play — Hamlet starts with “Who’s there” only for Leo Bill’s Horatio to enter — that restores the Norwegian subplot more or less in full, while Cumberbatch himself gradually casts off the shell of Hamlet as depressed, vengeful stepson for something much more significant and politically potent.

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Hamlet, Barbican Theatre, London — review

By Sarah Hemming for the Financial Times, 26 August 2015

“Who’s there?” The opening words to Hamlet are usually spoken by a soldier on watch, but in this much-anticipated production, they fall to Benedict Cumberbatch’s prince. Lyndsey Turner’s staging starts, not on the castle battlements, but in Hamlet’s room, where, lost in thought, he is startled by the arrival of his friend Horatio.

The switch feels piquant, given the hoopla that has surrounded this production. Cumberbatch’s immense following has prompted frenzied media coverage, arguments over early reviews, and the lead having to beg people not to film the show. Who’s there, indeed. (In my view, critics should, in the main, respect the preview process and theatres should respect audiences by charging less for preview tickets.)

But now, after all the fuss, the play is finally the thing. And what we get is not the greatest Hamlet, but a fresh, dynamic staging with a vivid, supple performance at its heart — a production packed with ideas but marred too by rough cuts and strange bits of rewriting.

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Hamlet review – Benedict Cumberbatch is the sanest of Danes

By Susannah Clapp for The Guardian, 30 August 2015

I don’t think I have ever seen a more rational Hamlet. When Benedict Cumberbatch tots up his bodkins, whips, fardels and slings in “To be or not to be”, he might be enlisting the audience’s support in a debate about assisted dying. Each possibility is laid out with complete clarity and assessed. Like a first-rate barrister in training, he nips around his mind to argue against himself.

Anyone who has seen Cumberbatch on stage over the past decade knows he is as quick and varied in the theatre as he is enclosed and enigmatic on the small screen. It is 10 years since he was a startlingly youthful Tesman in Hedda Gabler. He has since been languorous in Rattigan, exact in Ionescu and playfully monstrous in Frankenstein. Now it turns out that he also has an elastic ease with Shakespearean verse. He can shift an emphasis – “You were sent for…” – or drop in a 21st -century intonation without missing a beat or skewing the sense. He always transmits a meaning. He is never in the least bit mad.

This control is a marvel, and a limitation. Cumberbatch is arresting but not disturbing. The mightiest Hamlets are on the edge of a chasm, in danger of being engulfed. By madness in the case of Mark Rylance and Michael Sheen. By overwhelming grief and intellectual perplexity in the case of Simon Russell Beale. By massive political upheaval in the case of the 1964 Russian film. Cumberbatch may be beset, petulant and skittish but he never sounds as if he is might disintegrate.

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