A HEATHEN'S HAMLET. BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH SHOWS WHAT HE'S MADE OF.

The game's afoot, Watson.
To Denmark.
Me.
But not you.

Watching Benny Cumberbatch perform Hamlet was like watching Andy Murray storming around a tennis court, smashing his racquet,  cursing his ghastly mother for having turned his life into a competition,  with himself. 

Cumberbatch's Hamlet has, like Murray,  the subtlety of a Jihadi beheading, 
everything is full-on, coarse, harsh and outraged; 
speeches in which the self-discovery in each  line should reveal its successor were delivered  like a shouty catechism, so well-learned as to be listless, an empty, noisy recital;  

he is of the Branagh school of Shakespeare, Benny: 
Loud Equals Good; 

Roaring, Arms Up To Heaven,  Equals Genius.

Seen in the local cinema, mine was not a theatre experience but a broadbanded film of a National Theatre performance at the Barbican and its presentation was about as cheesy as showbusiness gets, prefaced by self-congratulatory trailers and teasers and tasters and worse than that, Lord Belbin Bagg, looking like a corpse fitted with those unnaturally white and even teeth favoured by US Senators, essayed an all-in-this-together-approach to his SkyArts interview with Benny and we were treated to part of this before the play proper commenced, a sort of a play without the play.  BelbinBagg is repulsive at the best of times, even on the radio,   but here, almost live, 

he was zombie-in-a-fright-wig, blood-curdlingly terrifying, 
the luvvie undead.

Give him his due, Benny swatted away BelbinBagg's questions, treating the wretched  old fraud  just like the impertinent showbiz slag that he is.



BelbinBagg, hinting that he, too, could play Hamlet, if he could be bothered, utilising his own sweeping  knowledge, not only of Shakespeare but of everything theatrical, comical-theatrical, tragical-theatrical, historical-theatrical, never mind of science architecture, philosophy, music, litereature and theology, BelbinBagg, NewLabour peer and a skidmark on culture's underpants,

 
 the most gorgeous polymath of our time, 
cosied-up to the callow youth, Cumberbatch, and enquired: 

But how does it  feel,  after three hours on stage, exposing yourself, playing the role to which so many aspire, perhaps the greatest role in drama, which is a hoop of fire, that you gotta jump  through.  Woddisit that you really feel?


Hoop of fire? 
It's not the circus, Melvin. 


  Yes, but how do you, y'know, feel?


Hungry.

You what? 

Hungry, I feel very hungry.

Ha-ha, but I'll haveta ask you the question again, the question which I ask all the great performers who come on my show.....


......
Writing Yesterday, Paul McCartney,
how did that feel, no, 
how did it really feel? 


How do I feel, after playing Hamlet?
Well, ask me when I''ve just done it;  

 
I dunno how I feel.
I feel hungry. 
Ask anybody, they feel hungry.

I suppose that the people in charge of the global broadcast, as opposed to the play's theatrical producers, thought that BelbinBagg might lend the imprimatur of a popular arts commentator to a film being shown simultaneously in cinemas around the world.  
Only if they were zombie fans. 
The man's a  tedious, vain prat, BelbinBagg. Worse than Michael Parkinson. And unnatural-looking, too.
Not a person I want to see, 
not when I've gone to see Hamlet.


Another pre-play taster took the Great Thespian to be worshipped by an inner-city school drama group, young teens, rehearsing their own inversion of the Unhappy Prince, in which Hamlet's unstifleable angst is collectivised, the other characters saying his lines for him, pointing at him accusingly, as though he were RD Laing's Identified Patient,  a WickerMan sacrifice.  It looked like strong stuff, their drama teacher enlivening an over-revered text, and showed that even the holy scriptures of literature can be re-invented, made darkly evangelical - here be sanity, madness and the family; here be tribes and states; here be the Blues; here be Death's indeclinable Invitation.
 No such imaginative departure,  however,  sullied Benny's Hamlet; as predictable, lacklustre  and artistically unrewarding as would be Dr Who on Ice, Cumberbatch merely took Buggin's Turn in the long line of stale, shouty Hamlets - knights of the stage, peers of the screen, dullards, mostly.

Like many, I suppose, maybe even most, I love the text more ardently than the performances,  often resenting the latter,  and, searching for a good one, I can only think of Jonathan Pryce's

1980 Hamlet-with-the-Voices-talking-to-him, internalising his father's ghost, which brings more to the play than I might, myself, reading it on the loo or muttering it sotto voce at a thousand of Ruin's insults.

It is an unsettling oddity, in passing, seeing someone talking to voices which sound only but undeniably in his head.
I remember onesuch:

Morning, Fred, how are you?
Awww, I got them bleedin' voices at me agin. D'you ever 'ave 'em?
No, I don't, Fred.
At me all the bleedin' time, they are, never bleedin' stop. Canchoo 'ear 'em?
No, Fred, what're they saying?
'Ang on... wossat...this bloke?  This bloke 'ere? Phwoar....Kill that bloke, they're sayin',  that bloke what's talkin' to ya. What a bleedin' thing to say. I 'ave 'em all the time, sayin' that, saying' kill that bloke.  Else I'll go barmy on me bed.  That's what them sayin' now, I'll g'barmy on me own bleedin' bed.
Canchoo 'ear em? 
Dunchoo ever 'ear em? 
I 'ear em all the bleedin' time.
Bleeders dunt leave me alone. 

He'll be dead, now, Fred Bachiocci;
I hope the bleeders've now shut up.

His much reported offstage pleas to his teenybopper audience - that he be allowed to perform his magic without being captured4twitter

 - 

show Cumberbatch's self-absorption, as does his dreadful curtain-call exhortation to  give to his current,  favourite charity, Syrian refugees, 


Give us yer focking money!

reminding his audience that their diversion, his performance and that of the ensemble, were as nothing, compared with refugeeism,
 as if  the world needed some overpaid luvvie to so inform it. Whence cometh this dire rite of passage, through which the celebrity-wealthy excuse themselves to the NewPeople of  their fortuitous and often undeserved richness by claiming ownership of a charitable cause and defying them  not to support it.  



It's not as though Cumberbatch is Ruritanian-Windsor, a tribe whose entire raision d'etre is to deflect scrutiny of it's parasitical vileness by attending ten-course charity dinners with their tits hanging out.

Mrs Prince Gormless, doing good in the world, 
for others.

 The nerve of some people, who do they think they are?
  


I'd have booed him, Cumberbatch,  had I been there and paid good money to see a performance of Hamlet,  these self-aggrandising charity bandits, they know no shame. 

It's like if I won the Lottery, tonight, and came on here, tomorrow, saying, C'mon, mr mongoose, lessaveafewquidoffya4acharideeofmychoice. 
Fucking madness is what it is.


Much too fast, rather like one madly imagines Status Quo performing Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, this Hamlet scrambles and leaps through a static but adaptable set which serves as grand hall, battlefield and graveyard, merely by the use of inventive lighting.  As if announcing the  speed and dynamism of the performance the play opens not with Bernardo and Francisco on the Elsinore battlement but with Hamlet, the student, 



musing to a song coming from  a nineteen-forties or fifties gramophone.  
The props and costumes veered vaguely, all over the place, 

 
from Hamlet's contemporary hoodie,  
to nineteenth-century Ruritania

 

and Ophelia's 'forties cocktail dress.

 
 


Weaponry ranged from antique  sabres and daggers to automatic pistols; 

it would not have seemed out of place to  see Claudius, in his three-piece suit,  praying regretfully into his iPhone.  



Claudius, played with some craft and subtlety  by  Ciaran Hinds, shed a light obscured by the shouty Hamlet,


the shouty Gertrude and all the other shouty bastards, 


Horatio, 

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and a hammy, much redacted Polonius -  and was played as much victimised as villainous, acknowledging the offences which had him  trapped, as King and thus State, within them,  and his was the most revealing character, igniting both outrage at his venality and sympathy for his predicament,   Hinds  exercising a sense of pace and rythmn, light and shade, perhapsing this and perhapsing that, a skill which one might expect from any middling playactor but beyond my discernment in Cumberbatch. 


 Overall, the generous staging was most impressive, serving as grand hall, 



battlefield and graveyard, changes being wrought in full-view by scampering ensemble members lugging props, obscured only by tricks of  lighting;

 
The ghost of Hamlet's father  departing, unshriven,  not into the mist but heading below-stage,  down Purgatory's stairs was one of the better  dramatic moments.  

Much was made and to good effect of shatteringly loud noises-off and skeins of modern dance music being woven into points of  the highest drama.  It hardly mattered, though, the stage; Hamlet can be played anywhere, with or without props and costumes, it is all in the spoken words and could be perfectly adequately presented by a wheelchaired company of Prince Harry's limbless irregulars, in  a darkened room.

Is it worth seeing, then, this latest celebrity vehicle, either in the theatre or on-screen? 
Depends on whether you have already seen Hamlet, I suppose, and on your funds.  I guess  that among  lovers of Hamlet more will have been disappointed than delighted by this show. And for those seeking Occasion, rather than mere cinema attendance, there will be local Am-Dram productions of it from now until the End of Days, some of which will be more servant to the play, than, as was this, to its principal actor. There is nothing whatsoever remarkable about Cumberbatch on screen and it is hard to see that, live, in the theatre, he would be any better, and in any event, celebrity Hamlets are like buses, there'll be another along shortly. If we can have the unspeakable Lenny Henry as Othello, we can have  Bruce Forsyth  as Julius Caesar. Alleged to have an impressive stage background it is, nevertheless,  one must assume, Cumberbatch's  Sherlock heartthrob celebrity and his Hollywood success which delivered him the role of Hamlet at the National, an institution, now, like so much else,  incentivised  and commodified.  The over-commercial approach to the cinema broadcast  was certainly irritating and distasteful, more like an advert for Cillit Bang than a presentation from the nation's  best.

If you haven't seen Hamlet performed then this is visually, at least, a fair introduction to playacting the Bard, although so fast and furious is the endeavour - maybe it was done in a rush to get to Benny's charity-hustling finale - that  a reading of the text, or a summary thereof, would make intelligible those matters skated-over or taken-as-read.  For those, like mr mike, Down Under, with an interest in Decline, Back Home, then a look at what was the fastest-ever sold-out West End show might prove more illuminating than did the show itself.

I am not sorry I saw it at the cinema but if I'd paid a hundred quid plus hotel and travel fares to see it in the Barbican I would be seriously disappointed.

Cumberbatch, himself, simpered that he had participated in order that a new audience - his fans - might be delivered to serious theatre, Bless,  and although one would have thought that veneration of this pampered dickhead and a likely enthusiasm for Shakespeare would be qualities mutually exclusive, he and his fans are the NewPeople and will allow New Ways to be mapped-out for them by their oppressors;  if even some of them, though, a handful,  are as unnerved by Hamlet  as I have been then their miserable, enslaved, consumer lives may yet find  Dissent.  Getting a bit late, though.

What is incontrovertibly delightful, however, from all this, is not only the big-screen, global simulcasts from the National Theatre but the fact that any school in the country can arrange to have anything from the NT's  recorded repertoire streamed to the classroom and supplied with teaching notes and aids freely, or  as Benny would probably say, for free.
 If there are teachers - and from the clip shown prior to Hamlet, there is at least one - who will take up this opportunity  to revive interest in literature, then GlobaCorp's barbarians, standing at the door, may not so easily kick it down.

As for the luvvies, in Shakespeare's time and up until quite recently they were known for the shallow, incontinent, dissolute and licentious fools that they are; nationally a Lord Chamberlain and locally a Watch Committee would police their amoral and delinquent  comings and goings and doings in-between; now that Filth  censors only Inconvenient Truth and not Obscenity, the players are become distinguished, Lords and Ladies of Light Entertainment.

I thought, finally, a bit harshly, I suppose, that the only good thing about Cumberbatch's Hamlet was that it didn't have Dame Helen Mirren in it, nor Dame M, aka Judy Dench from the Secret Service.

The institution itself, playacting, will simply adore, with gritted teeth, the business brought to it by a dreary celebrity taking a role to which many, many others would bring something fresh. 
 There is no business like showbusiness  and the spells of rivalries and opinions and spites and jealousies, although impellers of dramatic excellence,  do not bewitch those concerned with bums-on-seats and with mortgages-to-be-paid.
Benedict Cumberbatch's Hamlet, then, I must suppose, for all its repetitive and thoughtless, uninventive inadequacy is, in the end, good for the theatre business; whether that is a good unalloyed remains to be seen.

Regardless, anyway, of commerce-over-art, Benedict Cumberbatch seems to differ only in his privileged background from any other irritating playactor, hungry for applause, Oscars and money and should be dealt with in his own facetious coin: 

Report me and my cause aright,
 moans a dying Hamlet. 

OK, then Sherlock; 
if you insist.
You were fucking awful.