When I reviewed Benedict Cumberbatch in the first performance of this production, I labelled “indefensible” the decision to jerk “To be or not to be” from its emotional home in Act III, replacing Shakespeare’s original opening scene on Elsinore’s battlements. As it is, the authorial text of Hamlet has long been contested.
Lyndsey Turner’s production uses the second quarto, including one great soliloquy lost by the First Folio. Some things work, some things don’t. Just as Turner is to be applauded for her sensitivity to the military metaphors more present in this 1604 text, she was foolhardy to butcher it further in this otherwise conservative staging, which lacks the experimentalism that could make such risks exciting.
Still, three weeks in, Turner’s moody, over-cinematic production benefits hugely now that it no longer forces its star into a bravado standing start.
As expected, Es Devlin’s expensive original set did not encompass the possibility of restoring that first battlements scene: we still meet Cumberbatch, moping in an alcove, before the felt curtain sweeps away behind him to reveal a gorgeous pre-set banquet in a long-planned coup de théâtre. The consequence is still to diminish Horatio’s crucial role as our guide through the story, under-using the talented Leo Bill.
It’s a strange choice in a production otherwise so invested in soldiery: “mad” Hamlet will later pace the ramparts of his own toy castle. Yet this shortened opening nonetheless gives Cumberbatch, as powerful a presence as ever, a much needed emotional warm-up.
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This is a production cut to frame its star. Hamlet should be a prince on the fringes of his own birthright: in the original text, we meet ten other characters (including the ghost) before he gets a chance to speak. Cumberbatch not only claims the first line (“Who’s there?”, he shouts, only for Horatio to appear), he still delivers each soliloquy, even asides, to flashes of lightning, while the other characters swirl, slow-mo, around him. Mercifully, such touches have been considerably lightened since the first showing, as has the overblown theme from Nat King Cole’s Nature Boy, late of Moulin Rouge.
Turner sprinkles the show with clever moments: sycophantic courtiers no longer buy Elizabethan miniatures of the new king, but commemorative coronation plates. Urgency, that crux of Hamlet, is something with which her staging still struggles — when our prince should have his uncle at his mercy, “Now might I do it, pat”, is unconvincing when he is looking down from a balcony, at least ten feet up and half a stage away from him.
Cumberbatch himself emerges a sardonic, wrathful Hamlet, thrillingly charismatic, if short on the humility shown by more vulnerable Hamlets such as Simon Russell Beale or even David Tennant. Yet he is, as always, one of our great verse speakers, luxuriating in the melodrama of the Players’ “dream of passion”. By contrast, Ciaran Hinds remains a refreshingly controlled Claudius and Anastasia Hille is still outstanding as Gertrude, picking her horror-struck way across mounds of grave-dirt like a refugee from Beckett’s Happy Days.
Devlin is Lady Gaga’s designer too and it shows: the walls of Hell still writhe with slime from Alien; a funeral procession for Ophelia still looks like a zombie parade. The high, gunmetal walls of Elsinore’s palace are appropriately cold, but offer little intimacy: the chemistry between Siân Brooke’s naïve, yet intuitive Ophelia and Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, her Laertes, is swallowed by their over-sized setting.
Oddly, we lose Polonius’s advice to keep his garments “rich, not gaudy”, perhaps aptly.
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Gaudy and commercial as this production is, there’s still plenty to praise. If you spent £125 for a ticket to see Benedict Cumberbatch hold a mirror up to nature, you’re now getting a clearer vision than those who paid the same price in week one. Box office: 020 7638 8891, to Oct 31