I am a huge Benedict Cumberbatch fan. HUGE. I have watched every episode of Sherlock probably twice by now (which is pretty intense because each episode is 90 minutes long) and have taken so many Buzzfeed quizzes just because they mention his name. But even more than that, I’m a big Shakespeare fan. I love the intense emotional connection he pours into his plays and the constant suspense. In a way, he writes with a sense of realism. Even though the plots of his plays are rather hard to relate, the feelings invoked in each character are eerily real. Shakespeare (or whoever his cowriters were) wrote plays that have the unique characteristic of being able to transcend time to still be relevant to an audience centuries later.

Benedict Cumberbatch addresses this perfectly. As biased as I am towards him, I will try to put that aside for the purposes of this post. He really reaches the inner complexity of a character as famous as Hamlet. But even aside from that, the production itself was mesmerizing: particularly the lights. Without giving away too many spoilers, there was one scene that I will never be able to forget–a character sets off to a questionable suicide and right before she goes, the lights turn completely white and she appears to pull herself into a different world. It gave me the chills.

Actually, prior to this play I hadn’t read Hamlet at all, so I just googled a summary before I went to the event. But after watching this production, I spend the weekend reading the original work. Honestly, I don’t think there’s anything I would have changed. The director was very smart in his choices and he really made the most of an already incredible play. I tried to take some pictures with my phone, but I couldn’t do it justice. So I copied some pictures off the internet for you (these pictures are actually exactly the same quality we watched at Cinemapolis):