I was lucky enough to enjoy a memorable evening out a few weeks ago, with Benedict
Cumberbatch and my mother in law.
He was starring in the National Theatre production of Hamlet
which was showing at a cinema in Hong Kong and she was visiting from England. I
was eager to see Cumberbatch in action after the penny finally dropped that he has become a huge
media sensation in Asia. On a recent visit to Vietnam, he was the
only subject the young female representative, meeting me at Da Nang airport, wanted to chat about.
"I love Benedict...he is my lover," she confessed solemnly as we waited patiently by the baggage carousel .
The cinema was sold out though it has to be said, this
production of Hamlet is average at best.
Not surprisingly, it is very focused on the energetic superstar in the title
role, as he dashes and sprints over the stage like a hyper-active labrador. This interpretation has the youthful
exuberance of a sixth-form production and lacks a little soul and finesse. While the innovation is to be applauded, seeing
a play at the cinema is perhaps the worst of all worlds. You miss the intimacy of
live actors and can't make up for it with sexy cinematography or special
effects, like in Roman Polanski's classic film adaptation of Macbeth.
Anyone spending over three hours in a local cinema risks acute
hypothermia, given the sub-arctic air conditioning preferred in these parts, so
at least there was lots of energy to keep the audience's pulses racing.
The play was also a timely reminder of what a bloody good
writer Shakespeare was when it came to dealing with those timeless political
themes of ambition, corruption, injustice, deception and disorder. Some of his
lines work as perfectly in Asia in 2016 as they did in London in 1597, when his
work was first performed. In Hamlet, when
it all starts to go noticeably 'Pete Tong' and Polonius delivers the famous
line "there is something rotten in
the state of Denmark," there can't have been many in the audience, who
were not thinking about recent events in Hong Kong.
There is a very witty script for an updated and highly
satirical 'Hong Kong Hamlet' that someone once lent me and surely it about time
it was dusted down and performed.
"When sorrows come, they come not single spies but as battalions,"
laments Claudius and few would disagree with him, some four centuries after the
line was written. It's a shame Shakespeare
is not still around to write the next
series of House of Cards and add a modest short cameo role for Asia's latest heart-throb,
Benedict Cumberbatch.
