Benedict Cumberbatch (4 page)

I
n the spring of 2001, Benedict Cumberbatch could finally give up waiting tables. He was selected for two stage productions at the Open Air Theatre that summer in London’s Regent’s Park. Staging Shakespeare there was a summertime tradition that stretched back some 70 years. He would feature in the cast of two of the Bard’s comedies:
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
and
Love’s Labour’s Lost.

As we have established, Cumberbatch had already made his mark twice before in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. Aged twelve, his take on the bumbling Nick Bottom the weaver had been a hit in the Brambletye Prep School production. A few years later, at Harrow, he was Demetrius. A decade on or so, with the comic performer Gary Wilmot playing Bottom, Cumberbatch would play Demetrius for a second time. Director Alan Strachan had revived the production the
previous summer in Regent’s Park, transplanting it from the 1590s to the mid-nineteenth century.

Most of the cast of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
also spent the summer of 2001 on a second Shakespeare comedy, also directed by Strachan. In
Love’s Labour’s Lost
, Cumberbatch played the King of Navarre in a Wodehousian style, as if he were Bertie Wooster. His masterly portrayal of bluster and insecurity was met with some excellent national press reviews. ‘Finds humour and silliness where none previously existed,’ said the
Daily Mail
. ‘A pleasant young blade,’ remarked
The Sunday Times
, and went on, ‘A bit of a wag, a bit of a lad, fancies himself, not entirely wrongly, as sophisticated.’ In a quirk of fate that was to become a habit over the years, he found himself in the cast alongside someone who knew at least one of his parents – in this case Christopher Godwin. ‘He’d worked with my father in [Michael Frayn’s]
Noises Off
. I love the continuity of acting. It’s really lovely to be acting with people from my parents’ generation.’

Even though traditional theatre had been performed outside centuries before, contemporary audiences accustomed to ceilings would be taking a risk by watching plays outside. If weather conditions were idyllic, an evening of outdoor Shakespeare could hardly be bettered. In a dreary and damp British summer – and 2001 was one of far too many – it could be gruelling.

On one Saturday night, when the
Independent
’s theatre critic was present, the downpours were so persistent that near the halfway point, the actors had little choice but to run for cover. Such were the risks of performing theatre
outdoors
.
Legend has it that two elderly audience members were once overheard discussing a production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
they had watched in similarly wretched conditions. ‘That was the best
Dream
I’ve ever seen,’ declared one. Her companion replied: ‘Yes, pity it had to be a wet one.’

All the same, Cumberbatch’s King of Navarre in
Love’s Labour’s Lost
had made such a mark that it gained him a nomination in the 2001 Ian Charleson Awards, a prize given to the best performance in a classic play by an actor aged under thirty. Inaugurated in 1991, the Award – sponsored by the National Theatre and
The Sunday Times
– had been named in honour of the highly acclaimed Scottish actor whose life had been cruelly cut short the previous year, at the age of just forty. Among the winners and nominees over the years have been Jude Law, Tom Hollander, Helen McCrory, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Dominic West, and Ben Whishaw.

Cumberbatch would not feature among the top three prize winners in 2001 – Claire Price, Zoe Waites, James D’Arcy – but he would be shortlisted again in 2006, just months before his thirtieth birthday would have excluded him from the running. This time round, he was placed third for his performance as Tesman in
Hedda Gabler
. He was so affecting and convincing in the role that he persuaded the judging panel that ‘the play was as much his tragedy as Hedda’s’. To Cumberbatch’s enormous pride and satisfaction, he was congratulated at the ceremony by another actor who had excelled as Tesman when a young man – Sir Ian McKellen.

In the summer of 2002, Cumberbatch returned to Regent’s
Park for a further double-header of open-air Shakespeare (as well as a revival of Joan Littlewood’s
Oh! What a Lovely War
). If
Romeo and Juliet
was coolly received by the critics, his performance as Benvolio stood out for several of them, with one – the
Guardian
– arguing that he ‘seems to carry the whole weight of the tragedy on his frail shoulders’.
The Stage
praised ‘a commanding performance, making much from the comparatively small role to appear the stronger of the Montague rebels’.

The more modernist setting of
As You Like It
, relocated to the Edwardian 1920s, was generally deemed more successful. Back at Harrow in the early 1990s, he had triumphed as Rosalind, but now he was playing opposite that character as the intense and impetuous Orlando. For some he was a little too intense in the part. ‘Cumberbatch once or twice falls to ranting,’ wrote the
Sunday Telegraph
, but went on, ‘he more than makes up for it with his ardour and openness.’ It was a convincing portrayal of a love affair in the view of several press pundits, who were most disappointed that the press night performance had to be stopped early, due to more heavy rain. The weather scarcely improved over the next few days, but the cast battled on, while the audience cowered under brollies. The
Glasgow Herald
commented that Cumberbatch and Rebecca Johnson ‘echo Andie MacDowell and Hugh Grant’s sodden
Four Weddings
climactic embrace, but this time entirely authentically.’ ‘Both these actors display exceptional promise,’ enthused
The Stage
.

‘In true British spirit, it has to get really wet and dangerous
before the show is stopped,’ said Cumberbatch. Yet at least in torrential rain, a cast and an audience suffer together. At one
As You Like It
performance, he faced an early exit alone when he lost his voice. The awful moment occurred just after Orlando had whispered the line, ‘I cannot speak to her!’ A lone member of the 1,000-strong audience chuckled aloud at the unfortunate predicament facing the actor. As his understudy took over his lines, a despondent, voiceless Cumberbatch cycled home.

He encountered another embarrassing situation in the spring of 2003. It took place offstage, but it was mortifying nonetheless for the rising star. Casting was taking place for
The Lady from the Sea
at London’s (thankfully indoor) Almeida Theatre. At the audition, partly down to a
self-confessed
inability to remember names easily, he accidentally and repeatedly called the Almeida’s artistic director Sir Trevor Nunn ‘Adrian Noble’, at the time the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Fortunately, Nunn cast Cumberbatch anyway.
The Lady from the Sea
, which marked the theatre’s relaunch, was an unsparing emotional drama from the 1880s by Henrik Ibsen. The production starred Natasha Richardson, whose mother Vanessa Redgrave had delivered a stunning performance in the central role of Ellida 25 years earlier. It told the story of a married woman living in the mountains who still yearns to be free, both for the sea and for a sailor she once loved. Now married to a country doctor, and with two young daughters, she loses another baby at just five months of age.

Cumberbatch was in a supporting role, as an ailing but
self-important sculptor by the name of Lyngstrand. It was a part that required him to master the emotive and the darkly comic. ‘What made him funny,’ he later recalled, ‘is that he had no idea how ridiculous he was. When people were laughing at me in the audience, I tried to put a bit of white noise out there to block it out.’ The pomposity of Lyngstrand was the sort of role he was being offered more and more, which he was already a little concerned about. ‘Gaucheness is a default mechanism with me, so it’s immediately something people see I fit into a box of. But when you go home and look at yourself in the mirror, the one thing you don’t want to be is that person all the time.’

Cumberbatch was a more familiar name to the public by March 2005, when he was back at the Almeida in another Ibsen revival – this time 1890’s
Hedda Gabler
. Director Richard Eyre, fresh from presiding over a West End version of
Mary Poppins
, had claimed to have had the idea to revive the play after reading a copy of
Hello!
magazine in a dentist’s waiting room, in which there was an interview ‘with a rich, posh young woman who was celebrated for being celebrated’ and who confessed to having ‘a great talent for boredom’. ‘Mmmm, Hedda Gabler lives,’ thought Eyre, and on seeing Eve Best appearing in a National Theatre production of O’Neill’s
Mourning Becomes Electra
, he knew he had his Hedda.

Opposite Hedda’s icy contempt, Cumberbatch was Tesman, her husband and a struggling academic. He was widely praised for underplaying the foppishness of the character, instead emphasising his scholarly and thoughtful qualities. ‘It’s more interesting for me to play him differently,’
he said. ‘And it’s better for the ensemble too. I’ve always felt it belittles both her tragedy and his to present this idea that, right from the start, they’ve missed the boat because she’s married an idiot.’ The play sold out its run at the Almeida, and from late May of 2005, transferred with the same cast for a 10-week run at the Duke of York’s Theatre.

A year later, a lead role came Cumberbatch’s way: George in
Period of Adjustment
, a tragi-comedy from the pen of American playwright Tennessee Williams, and not often performed. Set on Christmas Eve, George is a Korean War veteran, who has just married Isabel (Lisa Dillon) but finds it impossible to consummate the union. He is reassured by Ralph (Jared Harris), his friend from army days, that such problems are not unusual for newlyweds, but it transpires Ralph himself is experiencing a disintegration of his own marriage to Dorothea (Sandy McDade). Williams was not generally known for comedy, and
Period of Adjustment
was by no means classed as one of his greats, unlike
A Streetcar Named Desire
or
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, and it had not been performed in London since 1962, but the performances drew some positive comment.
Time Out
’s theatre critic wrote that Cumberbatch ‘brings a virile warmth that makes us hope for the marriage’. Once again, he would be making both audience and critics alike root for a flawed character.

In addition to Cumberbatch’s stage work throughout this period was a surge in television roles. If the 18 months
following his brief
Heartbeat
showing in 2000 had been fallow, the autumn of 2001 found him filming
Fields of Gold
, a two-part thriller for the BBC about genetically modified crops and the way that governments collude with big business. It was written by two journalists, one of whom – Alan Rusbridger – was (indeed at the time of writing still is) the editor of the
Guardian
newspaper. It had, though, also been partially inspired by the John Wyndham sci-fi story
The Day of the Triffids
, and was focused on how scientific advances were spiralling out of control. It was broadcast in the summer of 2002.

Even in the minor roles of the cast list – about halfway to two-thirds down – Cumberbatch was eager to prepare for the part he had been assigned, and worked hard on background research, a decision that was not always popular. When working on
Dunkirk
in 2003, a documentary-drama about World War Two’s unforgettable May 1940 maritime evacuation, he found himself barred from contacting the surviving relatives of his character’s
real-life
incarnation. ‘The BBC were saying, “You might upset them.” I’m about to play him on screen! If that’s going to upset the relatives, I might as well get it over with now.’

Another role of 2002 saw him in the opening episode of that autumn’s most-talked about drama:
Tipping the Velvet
, boldly adapted by Andrew Davies from the equally bold Sarah Waters’ novel, and starring Rachael Stirling and Keeley Hawes. He would be subject to a great deal of good-natured ribbing from friends after accepting the part of Freddy. ‘I was the boy that turned a girlfriend into the
most celebrated lesbian on television. I got so much stick for that.’

At the time of writing, Cumberbatch has only ever appeared in a few full television series, and July and August of 2003 saw the transmission of the first of these.
Fortysomething
, written by Nigel Williams and based on his own 1999 novel, was a comedy-drama about the midlife crisis, and marked the return of Hugh Laurie to television comedy nearly a decade after his last series with Stephen Fry. Laurie played Paul Slippery, a general practitioner alarmed by the impending and unstoppable onset of middle age. Slippery’s crisis, in which he worries about his moribund sex life, is compounded by the amount of sex his three grown-up offspring are enjoying, not to mention his wife’s bid for liberation, now that their children have come of age.

In an illustrious cast – Anna Chancellor, Sheila Hancock and Peter Capaldi among many others – Cumberbatch was Slippery’s idealistic daydreamer of an eldest son, Rory. There were some concerns that the novel’s setting was a bit insular, with Paul Slippery being an actor in a BBC radio drama (the media as a subject for drama rarely attracts big audiences), so his occupation and workplace were changed to healthcare, as a satire on the NHS, as well as an exploration of how a middle-aged man could rediscover his love for his wife.

Maybe on BBC2 where high ratings were not quite as vital,
Fortysomething
may have had a chance to build an audience over its six-week run. But it was broadcast on ITV – which was aggressively chasing viewers – and not even a guest cameo by Stephen Fry in the second episode could stop the ratings
from tumbling. ITV panicked and shifted the series from a prime slot on Sundays to a graveyard one after 11 o’clock on a Saturday night. Repeats of the reliable
Midsomer Murders
filled the gap on Sundays. A handful of broadsheet critics continued to carry a torch for the series, but regrettably, it has never been repeated, and remains relatively obscure. Hugh Laurie, who had also directed some of the series, licked his wounds and auditioned for the part of another disillusioned medic. It would mean Laurie being resident in Los Angeles for several years making one of the most watched television series on the planet. An arrogant pedant of a man, who plays a musical instrument and lives at 221b, the character of Gregory House MD makes frequent nods towards the detective Sherlock Holmes in the way he could coldly analyse rare and otherwise undiagnosable medical conditions. It was the kind of character that fascinates a viewing audience, the kind that Benedict Cumberbatch would later get to play.