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Ameer Kotecha

Lindt has cheapened itself

[/audioplayer]You can’t play the part of Hamlet, only parts of Hamlet. And the bits Benedict Cumberbatch offers us are of the highest calibre. He delivers the soliloquies with a meticulous and absorbing clarity like a lawyer in the robing room mastering a brief before his summing-up. And though he’s a decade too old to play the prince (the grave scene sets his age at about 28), he cavorts about the stage like a ballet dancer delighting in his own athleticism. But he’s also much too nice. The darkest shades of melancholy and the raw emotional ugliness are missing. Hamlet is a bereaved, broody malcontent with a profoundly warped sexual outlook whereas Cumberbatch is a different species, a Hollywood star with the world at his feet. His vanity may have persuaded him not to focus on the prince’s misogyny and callowness. The insulting dismissal of Ophelia has more than a hint of tenderness about it. And the cross-examination of Gertrude, in the closet scene, hasn’t enough moral disgust.

Lyndsey Turner’s staging sets out to match the starriness of the lead performer but it risks overwhelming the action. Elsinore is a bombastic fantasy with a mountainous staircase, a Liberace chandelier and ominous walls festooned with weapons, antlers and ancestral portraits. Some of Turner’s innovations work well. Hamlet is first glimpsed alone, in iconic abandonment, brooding over his dead father’s belongings. At the interval a mini-earthquake buries the stage in a mudslide that becomes the jetty from which Ophelia launches her suicide. Other innovations are less successful. Hamlet marks his earliest bout of madness by donning a soldier’s tunic and dragging a toy fort on stage. Later he puts on a native American headdress.