Movie review: Hamlet

Benedict Cumberbatch. Photo / Getty

The new production under the NT Live banner (though actually staged at the Barbican) was the fastest-selling show in London theatre history. The Guardian reported that in the UK, 87 per cent of cinemas showed the live screening, surely the biggest audience in history for a Shakespeare play. But whatever the title character might have said, the play was not the thing. The playwright neither. It was the pulling power of Benedict Cumberbatch that packed them in. The star appeared at the stage door after a preview imploring fans to get the word out on social media that acting to a sea of red lights on phone cameras was quite doing his head in.

So he did quite well, considering. Bearing the weight of celebrity and its expectations lightly - there's not a grand or self-regarding moment in his performance - he makes a Hamlet who is a pleasing mess of contradictions but never less than very smart.

The barely post-adolescent playfulness grates a little - the textual clues make Hamlet almost 30, so dressing in a soldier suit looks vaguely ADHD, which is unhelpful.

This is doubly true since Cumberbatch has given us a radiant portrait of a fundamentally decent man, burdened by grief and duty and trying to understand the world and his place in it.

He effortlessly renews the big soliloquies and gives the poetry a light, fresh touch and he's good at self-mockery, too: both character and star seem to say that we shouldn't take them too seriously.

Is it too old-fashioned to say that Shakespearean tragedies are for taking seriously? Reclusive director Lyndsey Turner, grappling for the first time with the Bard, can't leave him alone. The frequent reshuffling of the text (the early decision to open with "To be, or not to be" was mercifully abandoned) has no apparent impelling idea and certainly doesn't offer us a striking change of perspective. More inexplicably, single words are updated, in case we don't get them. And characters do a lot of shouting.

More fatally still the massive set dwarfs the human drama. Designer Es Devlin has made an Elsinore like a gigantic haunted country house, with wrought-iron balconies and staircases that disappear into shadow.

In case we miss the point that everything's turning to shit, at interval she smothers the stage with rubbish through which everyone must lumber looking almost as silly as in Branagh's church-nave Macbeth (a notable exception: Ophelia's exit, more heartbreaking than any I remember).

Supporting performances are solid, particularly those of Hinds and Hille as Claudius and Gertrude - though there's precious little between them of the lustful passion required to explain their actions. But this is possibly more of a show for Cumberbatch fans than Shakespeare lovers.

Hamlet

Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Sian Brooke, Anastasia Hille, Ciaran Hinds, Jim Norton

Director: Lyndsey Turner

Running time: 205 mins

Rating: M (sexual references)

Verdict: For fans of Cumberbatch rather than Shakespeare.