The most hyped play of the year. Tickets booked over a year ago for one of the hottest actors around subjecting himself to the ultimate test of an actor’s ability. There was an expectant hush as the hard plastic curtain opened, to reveal the man himself…and then a whisper from off stage: “It’s coming back up!” Which the curtain promptly did, closing up again and ensuring that our first glimpse of BC was a fleeting one. An apologetic stage manager came out to explain this first technical issue, and then Cumberbatch himself came out to profusely apologise for the second issue (a broken trap door), standing directly in front of my in-laws, who almost certainly looked the most calm (and least likely to mob him) of all the front row.

All this to say, it was the fourth performance, during the previews, and things happen. I write this review in full knowledge that the cast and crew must have been very stressed and I’m sure none of them thought they gave their best performance. That said, there is little I can say to fault any of the performances, so I think it is fair for me to review those elements of the production that would have been unaffected by the technical issues. I am not a journalist, after all.

It cannot have been easy, planning a production of such hype and magnitude. The set designer, Es Devlin, deserves special praise for producing a set of enormous dimensions and exquisite beauty. It looked like a palace, but a Scandinavian palace, with all of the elegance and restraint that implies. The colours looked like (but probably weren’t) Farrow and Ball and were very soothing. The modern trend of using greenery indoors (which I first recall seeing at William & Kate’s Westminster Abbey wedding) was used to gorgeous effect. The lighting had that cool Northern aspect that one sees in Scandinavia and in Northern Canada, which is difficult to replicate but unmistakeable, once seen. If there was an overall theme to the costume design it escaped me, as they seemed a bit all over the place, with Gertrude in Edwardian leg of mutton sleeves, Hamlet in (mostly) modern dress and others in military uniforms of the WWII era.

It has been much reported that the play begins with the “To be or not to be” speech. Before seeing it, I was skeptical of this approach, considering that it would be facile to begin with such a crucial point in Hamlet’s emotional tailspin. And it was facile, but in the best possible way. The speech continues at the banquet, where he, a veritable sulky teenager, sits in his own black hole of despair and moodily says extraordinarily beautiful words to the effect of, “I’ll like totally kill myself.” For this is truly a Hamlet for our times, when forty-something people wear hoodies and play video games. Cumberbatch’s Hamlet is extremely smart and extremely emotionally immature.

The production keeps returning to Nat King Cole singing “There was a boy/A very strange enchanted boy” and “The greatest gift you’ll ever learn/Is just to love, and be loved in return.” Hamlet is well acquainted with filial love, but romantic love is not a gift that this Hamlet (a man-child recognisable to all 30-something women) will ever learn. He tells us, most passionately, that he loved Ophelia, but other than a fond look as she plays the piano we are given no evidence of this fact. He says, petulantly, “But I loved her” as though she were a toy that he had on the shelf and wanted to keep for when he was ready to play with her. The toy motif is strong, with a very funny impersonation of a toy soldier exemplifying Cumberbatch’s mastery of physical comedy.

I have long respected Cumberbatch as a stage actor, having enjoyed his Frankenstein with Jonny Lee Miller and having been enormously moved by his performance in Rattigan’s After the Dance. He did not disappoint, with quicksilver speeches that sat trippingly on his tongue. Sometimes, the hype is for a good reason, and it was for a very good reason here. It is a fiercely intelligent, hyper articulate performance and I hope it is feted as it deserves.

I am still of two minds about the production and Lyndsey Turner’s cavalier shifting of the speeches. It worked, definitely it worked, I was on the edge of my seat for 3 hours 45 mins (including the delay). I particularly enjoyed the gravedigger scene, with the second gravedigger recast as an officious Council jobsworth. But sometimes I think that Hamlet is like Wagner in that sitting through the boring bits means that when you get to the “Ride of the Valkyries” or the “To be or not to be,” the payoff means more. Perhaps this is also in keeping with the production, as this generation is not known for its attention span.

The rest of the cast deserves enormous praise. I have never seen Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern cast better, and Matthew Steer and Rudi Dharmalingam played the clueless college buddies to the hilt. Leo Bill’s Horatio could have stepped out of any students’ union in the UK. Jim Norton’s Polonius was moving, although as a devotee of Father Ted, I half expected him to shout “Crilly” at every turn. Anastasia Hille was convincing as a passionate, beautiful, initially clueless Gertrude, although her miking was echoey and distracting. I enjoyed the device of making Sian Brooke’s Ophelia a photographer at the beginning, which gave her an agency that Ophelia often lacks. The mad scene left me cold until the very end, when her exit was moving and, in an odd way, hopeful. Ciaran Hinds was a mountebank as Claudius, but then, Claudius is a mountebank. And Kobna Holdbrook-Smith was a wonderful Laertes. You could see him visibly ageing on stage as he was told of Polonius’s death. A stellar cast. And a worthy addition to the endless discussion that is Hamlet.

The final word I will leave to my husband, who patiently accompanies me to the theatre and the opera (as I patiently accompany him to the cricket). When’s the movie coming out?