Theatre: Hamlet

Running time: 3hrs 45mins (with intervals) ★★★ Almeida Theatre, London N1 (020-7359 4404). Until 15 April

Irish actor Andrew Scott is best known for his “brilliantly malevolent” Moriarty in the BBC series Sherlock, said Christopher Hart in The Sunday Times. Now, he has returned to the theatre to take on the melancholic Prince of Denmark – a bold choice for his Shakespearean stage debut. He “certainly looks the part”: his Hamlet is “small, intense and mercurial, fidgety and tormented, one expression following another with volatile speed”. And he has “an exhilarating line in sarcastic eyerolling”. Clad in black, at times barefoot, Scott’s hallmark is a “quivering, quavering emotionality”, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. Still boyish at 40, his Hamlet has “coltish vulnerability”, and we believe he is racked with grief for his dead father. What he lacks, though, is “full-throttle passion”; his lyrical but low-key performance mirrors this “disappointingly subdued” modern-dress production, with its emphasis on spying and CCTV surveillance.

I found the production “masterly”, said David Benedict in Variety. Director Robert Icke’s casting of Angus Wright as Claudius, his demeanour exuding “decency”, was a typically cunning move. By presenting the new king as fine and upstanding, Icke “lends affecting doubt to Hamlet’s revenge plans”, turns Gertrude (Juliet Stevenson) into a far more interesting character, and helps create the mood of a “genuine Scandi-noir thriller”. Among the many clever touches, said Michael Billington in The Guardian, I especially loved the staging of The Mousetrap, the play within the play. It has the king sitting in the front row of the Almeida audience, as a TV news camera tracks reactions to the players’ recreation of his crime. Another nice touch was seeing Ophelia (Jessica Brown Findlay) playing the mad scene as a “hospitalised patient”.

Not all the modern touches work, said Henry Hitchings in the London Evening Standard. The deliberately leisurely pace (there are two intervals) means that in some scenes the long evening loses “its grip”. But mostly, this Hamlet is “rich and beautiful – with Andrew Scott delivering a career-defining performance that’s charismatic and surprising”.