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[/audioplayer]You can’t play the part of Hamlet, only parts of Hamlet. And the bits Benedict Cumberbatch offers us are of the highest calibre. He delivers the soliloquies with a meticulous and absorbing clarity like a lawyer in the robing room mastering a brief before his summing-up. And though he’s a decade too old to play the prince (the grave scene sets his age at about 28), he cavorts about the stage like a ballet dancer delighting in his own athleticism. But he’s also much too nice. The darkest shades of melancholy and the raw emotional ugliness are missing. Hamlet is a bereaved, broody malcontent with a profoundly warped sexual outlook whereas Cumberbatch is a different species, a Hollywood star with the world at his feet. His vanity may have persuaded him not to focus on the prince’s misogyny and callowness.
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