Turner knows that “brevity is the soul of wit”, and has reinvented Hamlet for a whole new generation. When tickets were first released for this show, Cumberfans queued for hours and the production was a sell-out within minutes. Such was the hype and hysteria that Cumberbatch even urged fans outside the theatre not to record his performance with cameras. The National Theater Live finally made the performance into a film, screened on TV in the UK and around the world. The visual swagger of the production truly comes into its own on the screen as the camera takes in all detail, often lingering on the face of the Dane during the splendid soliloquies, much to the delight of his fans.
In an
;t=1068s" target="_blank">interview given to leading cultural correspondent Melvyn Bragg – filmed midway through his run as Hamlet – Cumberbatch said that he had been inspired to jump into the role by “Age, life experience, the opportunity to bring a new audience to a 400-year old piece of brilliance and to try to make Shakespeare as relevant now as he has ever been since then”. He also declared that parenthood had made him a better Hamlet. "I’ve just become a father and I used to think that I’d have to be childless to be a Hamlet. Then I thought, ‘oh that’s gonna be a difficult ingredient to play with', but it’s miraculous though – as I'm sure you know being a dad – that your thinking about how you were parented shoots up as well, so that's all fed into it. It was serendipity though, as it wasn't as planned as this was."
The Barbican’s Hamlet production will be broadcast in Budapest on March 16th, 27th, June 12th and 30th at the Uránia National Theater with original audio and Hungarian subtitles. Get your tickets now.
