What makes the evening so frustrating is that Cumberbatch has many of the qualities one looks for in a Hamlet. He has a lean, pensive countenance, a resonant voice, a gift for introspection. He is especially good in the soliloquies. “To be or not to be”, about which there has been so much kerfuffle, mercifully no longer opens the show: I still think it works better if placed after, rather than before, the arrival of the players, but Cumberbatch delivers it with a rapt intensity. He is also excellent in “What a piece of work is a man” and has the right air of self-doubt: in the midst of his advice to the First Player on how to act, he suddenly says “but let your own discretion be your tutor”, as if aware of his presumption in lecturing an old pro.
It is a performance full of good touches and quietly affecting in Hamlet’s final, stoical acceptance of death. The problem is that Cumberbatch, rather like the panellists in I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, is given a lot of silly things to do. He actually opens the show, sitting in his room poring over a family album and listening to the gramophone, which denies us the propulsive excitement of the Ghost’s first entries on the battlements. Later, in assuming an “antic disposition”, Cumberbatch tries on a Native American headdress and then settles for parading around in the scarlet tunic and peaked helmet of a 19th-century infantryman. At one point he even drags on a miniature fortress – where on earth did he find it? – from which he proceeds to take potshots at the court.
Whimsical absurdity replaces genuine equivocation about Hamlet’s state of mind and the effect is not improved by having him later strut about Elsinore in a jacket brazenly adorned on its back with the word “KING”. All this is symptomatic of an evening in which the text is not so much savagely cut as badly wounded and yet which crudely italicises what remains. A classic example comes in the inept staging of the normally infallible play scene.
The whole focus should be on Claudius’s reaction to this mimetic representation of his murder and Hamlet’s eagle-eyed observation of his uncle. Instead, Turner starts the scene with the spectators in shadow and their backs to the audience. Even when they turn round to face us, Turner has Cumberbatch himself act out the lines of the villainous Lucianus. In consequence, Claudius’s abrupt departure seems less the product of residual guilt than a hasty response to Hamlet’s rude intervention.
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