Fardels bear[ing], or Richard Armitage as Hamlet?

Last night I went to an NT Live broadcast for the first time — a cinema in town is hosting them now, a vast improvement from the 40 min drive one way, previously required to see one. I wonder how long this will continue, as there weren’t many people in the theater. However, this was also an “encore performance” — Benighted Encumbrance in Hamlet — so maybe everyone in town who’d wanted to see it already had.

I remember the reviews of this production were mixed at the time (2015) and I would concur with that assessment. I think I would have thought “this is just fine” if I hadn’t heard all the hype. Even so, paying $18 for a three hour movie, which is twice the normal price of the most expensive films around here, I do think it should be something special, the best of the best, and this play wasn’t that. I am a Hamlet lover, even if it’s not my favorite Shakespeare play, and I’ve been more drawn into it in the past, including by actors of lesser professional stature than Cumberbatch. I won’t belabor the rest of it, as it seems this production was unreasonably laden with expectations. That must have been hard on Cumberbatch — a heavy responsibility. I did enjoy Anastasia Hille as Gertrude and Jim Norton as Polonius.

As time passes I see more and more of Cumberbatch’s work — although almost always by accident as I find the hullabaloo around him quite a bit more interesting than I find him. He shows up in odd places. I just saw him in a film about an Irish gangster in Boston, where he stuck out like a sore thumb; no one has less of the aura of a formerly South Boston pol about him than Benny C. Probably the thing that I found most convincing was his role in 12 Years a Slave; the only thing I’ve considered extensively was Star Trek: Into Darkness, which I did not like, but he was the most talented person in it. And I’ve seen the first series of Sherlock, although not more than that. My main reaction to him when I do see him tends to be: what a strange man.

Last night was the first time I’ve seen in him in the theater (albeit on screen), and my reaction was essentially the same: I didn’t exactly not enjoy him. But: I’m puzzled. Perhaps this isn’t fair because I’ve also been told at least five times that his best theater work was in Frankenstein, which I haven’t seen. But even so, I’ll ask the question. What was he doing in this play? There are dozens of options for explaining Hamlet’s motivation — my preferred one, for instance, that his entire personality is distorted by an unresolved (unresolvable?) grief that festers ever more destructively; or that he’s a Machiavellian schemer; or that his father’s death and mother’s remarriage triggers an Oedipal crisis (the Freudian reading); that he’s driven by revenge but too unripe to execute effectively. The list of variants goes on and on. But all of them involve some significant emotional involvement, and key for understanding that involvement is the idea of disproportion or excess — a general theme of the play (Claudius’ excessive ambition, for example, or Ophelia’s extra-dimension response to being spurned by Hamlet, or, in general, power that exceeds its bounds or strategies, like the mousetrap, whose endgames are not anticipated by their initiators). Even the option that makes Hamlet into a rational thinker relies on the reading that he over-applies his technique to the situation.

But Cumberbatch is everything the opposite of emotion or disproportion, and this is what puzzled me last night. I get it, I understand why they hire him: he abounds in technique. He’s physically lithe, he has plastic features and big eyes and the planes of his face are unusual enough to draw the viewer’s attention; he speaks well, in a pleasant timbre, with the right accent; he’s capable of the necessary snark (even if I didn’t feel that it fit Hamlet’s ironic responses well, it was there). He doesn’t struggle verbally with the text; he’s fully integrated into the Shakespearan idiom (in a way, for example, that Ciaran Hinds was embarrassingly not) and he’s made it his own.

But all these things that make him a skilled actor militate against him being an effective Hamlet, at least for me, and even if he’s not embracing my preferred reading, involving the sincere inability to master his own grief. It was overall the most curiously emotionless, detached performance of Hamlet I’ve ever seen. Technically perfect — but with the exception of a few moments, largely bloodless. (In contrast to the end of the play.) It was really often as if they thought they could wave their arms around as opposed to expressing something genuine. Cumberbatch seems: unburdened, even as his Hamlet rhetorically asks why people put up with the aggravations of life. There is no: anguish.

It made me wonder — and I’m not saying this as snark — exactly why actors get where they are in their careers. I don’t think Cumberbatch is untalented but his reception in the profession seems to me (admittedly in ignorance of parts of his body of work that might change my mind) to stand entirely out of proportion to that talent. I don’t begrudge him his success; I just don’t understand it. He treads so lightly wherever he goes.

I’d been pondering whether this is sour grapes. I would be happy to see Armitage as Hamlet but I can’t imagine he’s especially interested in it (although he’s also been in the play as a spear carrier in the past), and there are roles I’d prefer — Iago, Prospero, Macbeth. I’m sure he’d say he’s too old, even if quite mature actors have played the role over the years. And then I thought, huh, why do I think he’d not be interested? I suppose part of it is that I’ve never seen him as particularly cerebral or heavily tinted by the pale cast of thought (pardon the little Hamlet joke there). I think one of Hamlet’s problems in dealing with his grief is that he lacks the tools, that he’s simply too much in his head at the beginning of the play to be able to look honestly at his own soul — the soliloquies notwithstanding, for they ask the questions without giving him — or us — the answers.

And if it’s really the case that I think Hamlet is overmanned by grief — that’s actually one of Armitage’s best modes.

It started to make me wonder what kind of Hamlet Armitage would be. I think about Ben Brantley’s comments about how Armitage’s performance as John Proctor in The Crucible went against the performance tradition to depict him as a very earthy farmer. I see him mixing a really healthy portion of quite physical anger in with his grief.

We may never know. Today I was listening to this and wondering if that’s the only clue we’ll ever have. Yet still, I’d like one chance to see him roar out: “Foul deeds will rise / Though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes.”

If there’s any actor who has “that within which passeth show,” it’s Richard Armitage. How do you think he would perform the role? What would his choices be?

 

~ by Servetus on March 10, 2018.