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There is a jaw-dropping moment just before the interval when Claudius stands alone on stage to give away his plan to kill the exiled Hamlet and all the windows and doors of the palace ballroom explode in a glittering shower of dust. The design throughout, particularly the lighting, is beautiful. My notes, scribbled in the dark, record my initial impression thus: “BLOODY BIG SET”. But then, this production is the opposite of minimalist: in the next scene, the wall behind Cumberbatch lifts and a vast ballroom, complete with staircase and chandelier, is revealed. Instead, the Barbican’s production begins with Cumberbatch being cranked into view on a raised platform. Today, a backlit bloke in white face paint is a touch underwhelming – more Scooby-Doo villain than terrifying spectral shade. Elizabethan audiences were easier to please in the special effects department. Let’s be honest: it’s probably better not to start with the Ghost. That’s still not the canonical opening – most productions kick off with the ghost of Old Hamlet stalking the battlements – but it makes a lot more sense than stripping out the emotional nadir of a character’s arc and setting it to the accompaniment of a trite song from Moulin Rouge! as the curtain rises. By the time I saw it, the soliloquy had been moved to Act II and the play began with Horatio arriving from Wittenberg to greet Hamlet, who is obsessing over his father’s death and his mother’s remarriage to his uncle. In a scalding write-up, Kate Maltby described this as “indefensible”, adding: “Imagine a production of Turandot that moved the climactic ‘Nessun Dorma’ to the opening number, just because, post-Pavarotti, football fans can sing along.” Even its star, Benedict Cumberbatch, confessed that it was “not the easiest place to begin a play”. Thanks to the Times’s decision to review the play before press night, we know that the Barbican’s Hamlet originally put “To be or not to be” right at the start of the play. (It’s called the “bad” one for a reason it renders Hamlet’s best-known soliloquy as: “To be or not to be, I there’s the point.”) Cuts are always necessary because the full text runs to more than four hours and the title role – at around 1,500 lines – is already demanding enough.īut there’s tinkering and there’s tinkering. Most productions offer a mash-up of the Second Quarto and First Folio versions, largely ignoring the First Quarto. There is no play called Hamlet – or at least no real, definitive Hamlet.