#benedict cumberbatch hamlet

[alexisnoir]

Hamlet - Benedict Cumberbatch - Sian Brooke - Ciarán Hinds - NTL - 2015 ...

If you haven’t seen Hamlet with Benedict Cumberbatch yet now you can thanks to Shakspeare Network on Youtube.

I recommend this to everyone! It’s in 4K too!!

[neeufflovestvshows]

IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THE 2015 HAMLET WITH BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH PLEASE WATCH IT PLEASE THE STAGING IS JUST PHENOMENAL I CAN'T EVEN DESCRIBE HOW AMAZING IT IS AND THE ACTING IS JUST BREATHTAKING

[geekpotpourri-blog]

Hamlet: Benedict Cumberbatch

Our friend Dylan who has spent more time on a stage then either of us has graciously given us his review! Read the rest of it here!

Dylan:

It strikes me that the secret to stage acting in comparison to screen acting is that one must be the character at all points in the show.  In a movie, the actor is told at what point in their life story they need to be, and they are there.  In TV shows an actor may be told their back story half way into the show, with a dozen episodes where this piece was missing from their mind. But in this production of Hamlet, more than any play I have seen, you could find all stages of the actor’s lives in their first five minutes on stage.

As the show opens, we see Hamlet, sitting on the floor with his Dad’s old crates, a photo album, and a portable record player, listening to Nat King Cole’s Nature Boy.  He is a young man, and he is mourning his father.  For the rest of the play, forget plots, kingdoms, politics, madness, all that matters is that he is a man who is mourning.  He mourns his loss of innocence, his resolve, his love, his mother, even his country, and in every soliloquy that mourning is there, behind anger, despair, you can always see it.  The same goes for Ophelia.  In too many productions Ophelia is portrayed as a young woman who is completely fine, maybe upset, and then WHAM, Mad. (Honestly this more or less harkens back to the age old sexist undertones that women are just a hair shy of madness on any given day, and I love that this play is taking that away.) This Ophelia is starting to crumble from day one, as her brother and father lecture her on how she really needs to stop loving Hamlet, because he probably doesn’t mean it, and even if he does he won’t later, and even if he did, he’s a prince, he couldn’t marry you, but we love you honey, and we want what’s best for you. And in her tiny stutter, her grabbing of her sleeve, we see the signs of her distress that will be mirrored in her later madness.

All the characters are like this, all the way down to the more obsequious than usually portrayed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the soldier in the yard, delivering Shakespearean verse like east London slang, and Laertes, a little too insistent about everything.

One highly underrated character that stuck out the most to me was Horatio.  The actor is a smaller man, with glasses, little hair, and tattoos all over.  The character carries a backpack with him at all times, and always seems a bit more out of place in the castle.  For the first time I found myself wondering things about this man.  Where does he live?  What is his connection to Hamlet? Why is he here?  In this performance he is the only person in the court other than Hamlet who we only see in casual clothes. And in the end, he is desperate to follow Hamlet in death.  More about this character is revealed in the last few minutes of the show.  At Hamlet’s death, he is ready to die, and is stilled only by Hamlet’s plea; to remember him, and to share his story to the world, to make sure his friend isn’t simply one more body.

The costuming was exquisite as well, in that all the characters seemed to have more or less their own era of dress, and yet all fit in well together.  The king and queen were from the ‘40s or earlier, hamlet seems to be in the ‘80s or ‘90s, and the acting troupe is from the late ‘60s early ‘70s.  But as the characters, particularly Ophelia and Gertrude, sink further into the horror of this world, their personas and their costumes sink, become plainer, baggier, less put together.

But the part of this play that cannot be raised high enough is the stage itself, and the acting upon it.  In the moment’s after Polonius’ death, the strobe lights flicker, and as the court searches for hamlet the actors periodically drop down to all fours, scampering like beasts to find this “madman”. As the King pronounces his son’s impending death, torrents of dirt, looking like a plague of flies, is rocketed through every door, covering the stage and turning the palace into a ruin. Ophelia, in her madness, clears an area in the dirt, brings down a trunk, and seems to hold a mock funeral for her father, though as she exits, Gertrude discovers that the trunk is filled with Ophelia’s camera and photos, that this was Ophelia’s funeral, that she dug her own grave. When Hamlet stabs Laertes, the lights created an image like shattering glass, and the cast began a subtle dance, mimicking motions of the duel itself.

These motions, as grandiose as they seem, make the piece more relatable.  It puts the audience into the mind of the characters, who at the end of the day, are just people, people who feel their worlds falling apart, who lose track of where their lives are supposed to be, and who mostly just feel scared and alone.  That is what Hamlet is all about.  That’s why so many great people have been able to find something new in every Hamlet production.  Hamlet speaks to the tremendous sadness that is in all of us, and tells us that even entire royal families can fall to its blows

[elennemigo]

Benedict in character: Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Hamlet (2015)

[ohgodyes]

Benedict Cumberbatch in Hamlet

(x)

[futureofthemasses]

Pretty sure nothing that ever happens in my life will be quite as awesome as seeing Benedict Cumberbatch as Hamlet from the fourth row.

Benedict was fucking brilliant, as expected.  The amount of emotion he can put into things is astounding.  Seriously how Ben what the hell.  The rest of the cast was also excellent.  Everyone made it more realistic by actually being the parts rather just reciting them.  I was a little on the fence about Ophelia, but she freaking owned it on the madness bit.  It was probably the darkest Hamlet I've ever seen but definitely one of the best.  Ben was playing it up more towards Hamlet being genuinely mad, at least slightly, rather than fully pretending to be mad.  There were some serious moments where he just got this possessed expression on his face and it was just awesome to see, particularly from so close.  The set...oh my God, the set.  It was gorgeous.  The stage was enormous and they used it to their full advantage, having actors go in and out from various locations, pushing scenery around, the works.  It basically stayed as the grand entranceway to the castle and then they altered things around it depending on the scene, but the set was just breathtakingly beautiful.   It was set in a sort of WWII era time period but with occasionally bits that made it almost feel like a futuristic post-apocolyptic WWIII.  They actually closed off the first half with Claudius on stage alone and suddenly there was an enormous explosion of confetti EVERYWHERE and we ended up getting covered (yes, I brought some with me) and then when it came back for the second half the stage was set up like a bomb had gone off, with debris and destruction everywhere.  So yes, it was fantastic. Totally worth paying the extra cash to get the fourth row just to say that I was literally a few feet away from Ben at points and so that we could see the actors' expressions in amazing detail.  Everyone was awesome and I love everything right now.

[iamsherlocked2012]

Hamlet Cosplay

I really want to do a Hamlet cosplay of the outfit he wears in the final scene just before the interval. He has a David Bowie T-shirt on (which I've ordered), but he also has that fancy coat with the white decor on the arms and collar and back (and the word KING written on it). Does anyone know what TYPE of coat this is...what I would call it if I was Google searching for one...or where I might be able to find one. (Obviously I would write the 'king' part on myself). Thanks!

[charlotte-rhubarb]

How Cinderella got to see Benedict Cumberbatch

I have a guardian angel named Andreas.

This 80-year-old gentleman and I started chatting while we were queuing for return tickets for tonight's performance of ‘Hamlet’ with Benedict Cumberbatch in the lead when the lady at the counter says they have two tickets for £62 each. To which Andreas turns to me and says "May I treat you?" I'm shocked: I tell him I can't possibly accept it, it's too much money, to which he replies "At this age, money doesn't matter." So as the rest of the queue watch us with eyes and mouths open, he sails over to the counter and pays for my ticket. Everyone around us is muttering and I still can't believe it, I tell him I'll buy him anything he wants from the bar but he just asks for some apple soda, says he can't drink alcohol. And after I come back from the bathroom he's gone off and bought me a program; "Something to remember the evening by" he tells me. I still can't believe it all happened: that I got tickets in the stalls for free because a complete stranger liked talking to me!? Afterwards, he said: "I wouldn't have enjoyed it nearly as much without your company." This man deserves to be made a saint, because he made it possible for Cinderella to see Benedict Cumberbatch.