Cumberbatch takes on ultimate challenge with role of Hamlet
Actor’s presence a distraction from real star: Shakespeare’s masterpiece
It will be hard to leave aside all the hype as Benedict Cumberbatch — big- screen movie star and BBC- TV’s Sherlock — takes on the role of Hamlet at London’s Barbican theatre. Propelled perhaps as much by star- struck fandom as by any serious love of theatre, ticket sales have been brisk.
Over the next few weeks, the social media chatter will intensify and be joined by a vast chorus of critics. We can expect bragging, sobbing, perhaps even fainting. There will be earnest discussions. There may even be bad jokes: You can’t make a Hamlet without breaking a few eggs, Benedict.
But in bursting to know “How good?” we’re in danger of losing sight of “Why?”
Why does an actor put himself ( very occasionally it’s herself ) through this most testing of Shakespearean roles? It contains the most lines of any part in the canon and can require a nerve, lung and sinew- testing workout for at least three hours, depending on how much of the text the director ( here Lyndsey Turner) decides to retain.
It’s not just because, like Ever- est, it’s there for the ascending. It’s not just because others have climbed it, stood at its summit. It’s because it’s possibly the most complete psychological portrait of a human being in the whole of world theatre — as fully rounded as anything in nature, shaded with incredibly rich and subtle colours, the verse a dream to speak and listen to.
But it is most exciting precisely because there always seems to be more hinterland to discover, more personality to reveal. Not to tackle the role, if you’re called upon to do it and are deemed capable of braving the task, isn’t simply to turn down the challenge of a lifetime; it’s almost to turn down the challenge of life itself.
How does the play achieve such blatant pre- eminence through its singular tragic hero? The answer is two- fold: the mechanics of the plot and the sophisticated metaphysics.
As to plot, there is an extraordinary succession of pivotal dramatic moments. The emotional stakes are immediately at fever pitch: Hamlet is in grief, in a state of free- fall. He meets the ghost of his father. From then on, there is a compulsion to exact revenge for his murder, but that is not straightforwardly engineered. The more Hamlet seeks resolution — adopting an attitude of feigned madness, confronting his mother, dismissing Ophelia, wavering on the brink of killing his father’s murderer — the more irresolute he becomes. Events propel him to a bloody conclusion not of his direct making.
All this in itself presents innumerable decisions to the actor in terms of tone. But above and beyond that, it’s the existential crisis seeping out of the pores of the plot that lift it into a category of its own. The greatest confrontation running throughout the play is Hamlet’s with himself. That internal scrutiny is relayed, via the soliloquies, to us — most famously in the speech beginning “To be or not to be.”
Melodrama is shown the door, the politics of Elsinore become a sideshow, and we are let in, instead, to the mind. It’s as if we see human consciousness made aware of itself for the first time — the play tracing a cycle from fresh- eyed vision to final rest. Hamlet is a 400- year- old voyage of discovery at the centre of which lies the question asked in the very first line: “Who’s there?” As William Hazlitt sagely remarked: “It is we who are Hamlet.” The character’s core vulnerability is ours.
That’s why the huge fanfare about Cumberbatch is merely a minor distraction. It’s not that we’re lucky to have him do the play. It’s that we — and he included — are lucky to have the play. Without it, it’s hard to imagine we would have the same understanding of ourselves, the necessary vocabulary to describe our fragile humanity.
It’s possibly the most complete psychological portrait of a human being in the whole of world theatre.
Every scene has its quotable passages, but who wouldn’t, in contemplating death, find deep truth and consolation in the lines: “If it be now, ’ tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all? Let be.”
Cumberbatch will be the latest in the princely regeneration game seen in every era since the play’s première.
But it’s as a conduit for Shakespeare’s genius that he makes his mark. If his performance does enter the annals, it will be down to the degree to which he is attuned — and attunes us — to that genius.
For all the noisy circus that surrounds this star, the play’s the thing, and he its humble plaything.