Actor’s Mom Says Hamlet Performance Is ‘Bloody Good — Benedict Cumberbatch News
Cumberbatch, whose Prince of Denmark slouches in a hoodie, listening to gramophone records as he plots his revenge, is Cumberbatch “a blazing, five-star Hamlet trapped in a middling, three-star show”, says Dominic Cavendish in the Daily Telegraph. He also stars on the BBC TV show “Sherlock” in the title role and has appeared in such films as the “Hobbit” movie series, “August: Osage County”, and “The Fifth Estate”.
The London Times critic Kate Maltby, who recently broke theatreland’s gentleman’s agreement and reviewed the production after a preview show, upped her original review from two to three stars but wrote: “This is Hamlet for kids raised on Moulin Rouge“.
He said: “After all the hype and hysteria, the event itself comes as an anti-climax”.
The critics may have had mixed reviews of the new production of Hamlet starring Benedict Cumberbatch, but the actor’s mother gave no doubt that she was a fan of her son’s performance, saying her son was “a bloody good Hamlet”.
He said: “The actor commands the stage with a whirling energy but we rarely feel soul-to-soul with this Hamlet, partly because he’s often made to deliver the soliloquies against distracting freeze-framed or slo-mo action”. So too is this production.
Benedict Cumberbatch stars alongside with Ciaran Hinds as Claudius, Anastasia Hille as Gertrude, Leo Bill as Horatio and Sian Brooke as Ophelia.
The Guardian was a bit more glum, with Micheal Billington saying that Benedict Cumberbatch is “imprisoned in a dismal production”.
Perhaps, suggests The Independent’s Paul Taylor, the problem might be Cumberbatch’s fame. One of the newspaper’s criticisms was the decision to move Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be…” soliloquy from the third act to the first. She added: “He was quite lively growing up, but I thought that was phenomenal”. “The evening’s energies are dissipated by the confining Elsinore of designer Es Devlin, and director Lyndsey Turner’s tendency to hack the text”.
Andrzej Lukowski in Time Out also gives the show three stars and gives Cumberbatch moderate praise.
“This is a fine Hamlet in a patchy, occasionally puerile production”.
Dressed like a scruffy modern-day student, alternately pensive and manic, this Hamlet is a man whose mind buzzes faster than he can process – a quality shared by several Cumberbatch characters, from sleuth Sherlock Holmes to code-breaker Alan Turing in “The Imitation Game”.
“The rest of the cast, if not quite second division, is outclassed by its leading man”.
“Full of scenic spectacle and conceptual tweaks and quirks, this “Hamlet” is never boring”.