Es Devlin’s design is a tremendous look: so freighted with detail, glorious colour and bold strokes that audience members start making notes for interior decoration. Es Devlin's set is so sumptuous, intricate and declamatory that it runs the risk of becoming an alternative showĪs it is, this is an evening of fitful illumination.
It might have given the production an extra touch on the tiller, and helped to make director Lyndsey Turner’s whirling ideas coalesce. I would have been curious to see it open the play, as it did throughout most of the previews. The speech is now delivered well into the action, though a little earlier than usual. “To be or not to be” is more of a “to do or not to do”. The big soliloquies become a way of Hamlet’s reasoning himself out of difficulty. Cumberbatch may be beset, petulant and skittish but he never sounds as if he is might disintegrate. By massive political upheaval in the case of the 1964 Russian film. By overwhelming grief and intellectual perplexity in the case of Simon Russell Beale. By madness in the case of Mark Rylance and Michael Sheen. The mightiest Hamlets are on the edge of a chasm, in danger of being engulfed. Cumberbatch is arresting but not disturbing. This control is a marvel, and a limitation. He can shift an emphasis – “You were sent for…” – or drop in a 21st -century intonation without missing a beat or skewing the sense. Now it turns out that he also has an elastic ease with Shakespearean verse. He has since been languorous in Rattigan, exact in Ionescu and playfully monstrous in Frankenstein. It is 10 years since he was a startlingly youthful Tesman in Hedda Gabler. Anyone who has seen Cumberbatch on stage over the past decade knows he is as quick and varied in the theatre as he is enclosed and enigmatic on the small screen.
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