On Wednesday night, Benedict Cumberbatch steps on to the Barbican stage for the first time to perform his eagerly awaited Hamlet. Inevitably, it is his fame as TV’s Sherlock and his success in films ranging from The Imitation Game to Star Trek and the Hobbit movies that lends spice to the occasion. But, for all the hype about Cumberbatch switching from being the sleuth of Baker Street to the conscience of Elsinore, it would be absurd to see this as a piece of dubious celebrity casting.
Cumberbatch served a long theatrical apprenticeship before getting to play the prince. I first really clocked him when he played Tesman in an Almeida revival of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler in 2005. I wasn’t alone in spotting him. Harold Pinter, while greatly admiring Cumberbatch’s performance, told his wife, Antonia Fraser, that the actor would never make it to the top with a name like that. As Antonia says: “Whatever Harold’s great qualities, the gift of prophecy wasn’t one of them.”
But Cumberbatch quickly sealed his theatrical reputation. He was the nonconformist hero of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros at the Royal Court in 2007 and the hedonistic historian in Rattigan’s After The Dance at the National in 2010. It was his sensational double as both Frankenstein and the monster at the National in 2011 – alternating the roles with Jonny Lee Miller – that marked him out as a potentially great classical actor. My first thought was that this man was now ready to tackle the great Shakespeare roles: Richard II, Macbeth, Hamlet.
Even his Sherlock confirmed that impression. I remember a colleague, Benedict Nightingale, once dubbed John Wood, when he played the great detective, “the Hamlet of Baker Street”. And Cumberbatch invested the character with a similar blend of quicksilver intelligence and inner melancholy. You could even see Martin Freeman’s Dr Watson as the equivalent of Shakespeare’s Horatio.
So how will Cumberbatch fare as Hamlet? The role itself is one that never ceases to fascinate. Back in 1899, Max Beerbohm described it as “a hoop through which every eminent actor must, sooner or later, jump”. But Beerbohm’s friend, Oscar Wilde, was nearer the mark when he wrote, eight years earlier, that: “In point of fact there is no such thing as Shakespeare’s Hamlet. If Hamlet has something of the definiteness of a work of art, he also has all the obscurity that belongs to life. There are as many Hamlets as there are melancholies.”
Wilde’s point was that the actor’s individuality is a vital part of the interpretation. That is true of all Shakespeare. But the actor who plays Lear, Falstaff or Cleopatra is necessarily involved, to some extent, in a feat of impersonation. What makes Hamlet, as a role, unique is its capacity to accommodate an actor’s particular strengths. John Gielgud highlighted Hamlet’s lyrical introspection, Laurence Olivier his athletic virility, Nicol Williamson his rancorous disgust, Mark Rylance his tormented isolation, David Tennant his mercurial humour.
It’s a role that defies age: I saw David Warner play it when he was 24, Michael Redgrave when he was 50 (Cumberbatch at 39 more or less splits the difference). It’s also a part that famously transcends gender. Of the three female Hamlets I’ve seen, Frances de la Tour’s was marked by a swashbuckling vigour, the German Angela Winkler’s by a delicate tenderness and Maxine Peake’s by a built-in bullshit detector.
To put it in a nutshell, no actor can ever quite fail as Hamlet. I wouldn’t deny the role tests the actor’s vocal technique and physical stamina to the utmost. But the character – compounded of piercing sanity and existential despair, infinite hesitation and impulsive action, self-laceration and observant irony – is so multi-faceted, it is bound to coincide at some point with an actor’s particular gifts. The real test is not whether an actor can play Hamlet: it is how much of the character’s multi-dimensionality he can encompass.
Obviously the world is agog to see what Cumberbatch makes of the role; and it would be idle to pretend that his TV and movie-fame is not a major reason for the excitement. But I would say that attitudes to Shakespeare’s tragedy have shifted in my lifetime. We don’t just go to see a star performer: we go to see a play. Elsinore, for instance, is no longer a shadowy backdrop but a crucial part of the experience: in countless productions, including those by Yuri Lyubimov, Richard Eyre and Nicholas Hytner, it has become a network of sinister espionage.
Hamlet himself is also increasingly defined by his relationship to the surrounding characters: in recent productions, Patrick Stewart’s shrewdly pragmatic Claudius, Pippa Nixon’s tragically abused Ophelia, Imogen Stubbs’s drink-driven Gertrude have come into just as sharp a focus as the protagonist. I hope that when Lyndsey Turner’s Barbican production is officially unveiled to the press, it will not be judged simply as a test of Cumberbatch’s classical skill: Frankenstein alone proved he had the lungs for the part. It will also, I trust, be seen as a play with a profoundly mysterious hero, who, as Wilde said, has all the obscurity of life.
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