Alas, poor Benedict. It’s hard to flatten Hamlet: he is, after all, Shakespeare’s most quicksilver creation. As he wrestles with whether or not to avenge his father’s murder, our prince touches on sin, fate, truth, beauty — what he doesn’t do, as far as I recall, is distil three hours’ worth of philosophy into a Nat King Cole cliché.
Benedict Cumberbatch has all the energy Hamlet requires, sweating around the Barbican stage like an oleaginous electric eel, but there’s little subtlety in this performance. Mourning his father, Cumberbatch’s Hamlet gurns beside his gramophone, from which a sonorous voice intones that the greatest thing we’ll ever do “is just to love and be loved in return”. This is Hamlet for kids raised on Moulin Rouge.