I just got back from seeing Hamlet, starring Benedict Cumberbatch. It was very enjoyable, but I found some of the directorial decision to be just bizarre. You have to understand that Hamlet is certainly my favorite Shakespearean play. This is due to the fact that we did it in high school and, while I just had a few small parts, I went to all the rehearsals and ended up standing in when people didn’t show up. The result is that I really know the play by heart.

Benedict really was quite wonderful. I thought he delivered the soliloquies especially well and they did this clever thing in which the action stopped and he delivered the lines as if he was thinking about what he was saying while in the midst of the crowd, which I thought was more effective than clearing the stage for the speech. There are many ways to play Hamlet, of course, and he played him as fully aware, but filled with self loathing and self-disappointment that he was not acting to avenge his father’s death. He made it clear that Hamlet’s madness was faux madness, contrived for a purpose. The madness scenes were marred slightly by some silly directorial stuff I’ll complain about below. He delivered his comic lines with good timing.

Claudius, played by Ciaran Hinds (he has been in all kinds of things you have seen), was played as evil incarnate, conniving, unrepentant and murderous, which I think is a completely legitimate reading, especially for giving Hamlet some one to play against, although I suppose it might make you wonder what Gertrude sees in him (but that is always an inherent problem in the play). He was powerful and confident and delivered his big speech (that ends “My word fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”) perfectly.

Critics complained that Gertrude, played by Anastasia Hille, was too young to be Hamlet’s mother, but we weren’t sitting close enough where that made a difference. I thought she was very good. I thought the Horatio (Leo Bill) was good, despite being stuck in a flannel shirt (which made no sense even for the time they set Hamlet in) and, for some reason, carrying a back pack in all scenes (OK, it makes sense when he has just arrived from Wittenberg, but he would have taken it off when he was in the castle). The scenes with the ghost were effective and the gravedigger’s scene was appropriately amusing. The whole play within a play (which can be kind of clunky) was handled very well.

All of the above made it a completely enjoyable evening, but there were so many weird directorial decisions, that it really distracted from the enjoyment of the performances. Here is what annoyed me the most:

• The whole thing was set is some sort of mid-20th century time, but without conviction. The guards carried guns on the ramparts and Laertes show up at the end with a pistol to avenge his father, but some of the costumes and the set in particular didn’t fit the period. And if you ask me, having people waving guns around for the whole play makes the fencing at the end seem contrived.
• The set in the first act was sort of the huge main room in the castle, with a staircase up one side and giant doors going out the back and various other ways to exit and enter. It worked pretty well, even for the scene where Hamlet meets his dead father. But in the second act, for no explainable reason, the set has been filled with what looks like crushed rock or dirt, all over the set and out the back, through the huge doors and going up maybe ten feet. It was initially impressive and was great for the graveyard and scene on the battlefield with Fortinbras, but it made no sense for the entire rest of the second act, especially Ophelia’s mad scene and the final duel. I’m sure they were trying to make some sort of point about war or something, but it was idiotic.
•  The interpretation of Polonius missed the boat. It seems to me that Polonius is in the play to provide some comic relief as a blustering windbag and they utterly failed to mine the comedy in his part. The most egregious failure was in his scene with Laertes (“In these few precepts in your memory write”), which is not about the precepts (which are, of course, iconic bits of wisdom) but about the fact that he is going on and on while Laertes wants to leave. In this case, they have Polonius reading it from a pad of paper, effectively killing the scene. They simply threw away the whole scene with Hamlet and the clouds (“Do you see that cloud in the shape of a camel”) to the point where they might as well have cut it. The problem with this whole approach is that, in failing to make Polonius a comic foil, he is just some sort of court functionary and not the lovable windbag that the audience has some feeling for and his accidental death is not as wrenching.
• The scenes with Rosencranz and Guildenstern were also pretty flat. Less amusing banter between old friends, at least at first, which, again would have made their betrayal of Hamlet and eventual death more effecting.
• The Ophelia scenes also didn’t really work. The “Get thee to a nunnery” scene was pretty good, but was lacking something (I’m not sure what). And her mad scene after the interval was simply interminable. Of course, it didn’t help that she was barefoot and wandering over all of those stupid rocks and occasionally doing completely pointless stage business with them. Speaking of pointless stage business, they also had her carrying a camera around taking pictures (it was hard to see what that added to the character) and then dragging around a trunk of photos during the mad scene. (OK, you tied it together, but why?)
• I suppose the director was trying to make some sort of point about Hamlet’s faux descent into madness by having his dress in funny costumes and use use silly props in those scenes. I really don’t think Cumberbatch needed the help to make the point and it was really directorial hubris. It didn’t ruin the scenes because Benedict carried it off, but it was nonsensical.

I think sometimes directing involves getting out of the way. I’m so glad I went and it really was very good, but it should have been better with his performance at the center.

A few additional thoughts the next day: Hamlet, uncut, is at least five hours long, so the decisions made on what to cut and what to leave in are crucial. Here, the decision was made to make the focus of the play the battle of wills between Hamlet and Claudius, which makes sense and was helped by superior performances by the two actors. Less emphasis was placed on Hamlet’s almost Oedipal rage at his mother. The whole Fortinbras subplot is often just cut out completely, but that was left in here to make the play about politics and power and not just a son’s revenge. I get the decision, although there is a reason that the Fortinbras scenes are cut–they are boring and lack the soaring language of the rest of the play. I think the decision to emphasize the struggle for power and politics may explain why Polonius and Rossencranz and Guildenstern were played more as court functionaries rotating in the orbit of Claudius, robbing them of their dimension and the play of much of its wit. (A big mistake, as I noted above.) I’m not sure exactly what was cut, although the whole interlude with the players seemed far shorter than I remembered. Finally, given the decisions that were made to make the play centered more around Hamlet and Claudius, why did they leave in the entire Ophelia mad scene and try (unsuccessfully) to milk it for all it was worth? It was a scene that was so long and so out of place with the rest of the production’s sensibilities that the play lost its pace.

But Cumberbatch was great.