The English actor and film producer, Benedict Cumberbatch received a rather enthusiastic response from the celebrity-packed audience during the official opening night of Hamlet in London.
Mark Gatiss, his co-star described his performance as "magnificent."
"I always knew he had it in him," he told the BBC. "We're all very proud and impressed."
Actress Wanda Ventham, Cumberbatch's mother was among the audience, she described him as" a bloody good Hamlet".
However, critics gave the play a mixed reception.
Dominic Cavendish, of TheTelegraph said that Cumberbatch's Hamlet justified the hysteria, thus awarding it with four stars.
Cavendish actually thinks Hamlet's performance deserves a five-star but the revisions in the text done by Lyndsey Turner, the director, brought down the expectation for the play.
Paul Taylor, being one of the foremost American choreographers of the 20th century, complimented the show with three stars. Taylor said that it's not easy to connect with Benedict Cumberbatch's Danish prince, due to the method of presenting the play.
He further stated, "The actor commands the stage with a whirling energy, but we rarely feel soul-to-soul with this Hamlet, partly because he's often made to deliver the soliloquies against distracting freeze-framed or slo-mo action.The production, however, often feels curiously uninvolving, as though it lacks a central impulse. I hope that Cumberbatch does more live Shakespeare - in less insanely pressurized circumstances."
Michael Billington, a British author and arts critic said, "After all the hype and hysteria, the event itself comes as an anti-climax. My initial impression is that Benedict Cumberbatch is a good, personable Hamlet with a strong line in self-deflating irony, but that he is trapped inside an intellectual ragbag of a production by Lyndsey Turner that is full of half-baked ideas."
Billington also said, "Cumberbatch, in short, suggests Hamlet's essential decency. But he might have given us infinitely more, if he were not imprisoned by a dismal production that elevates visual effects above narrative coherence and exploration of character.
