BENEDICT Cumberbatch’s Hamlet solves the murder of his father within 20 minutes.
The Barbican production of Shakespeare’s most lauded work, which usually details Hamlet’s descent into murderous insanity, will instead see him brilliantly proving his uncle was the killer in front of the whole Danish court.
A theatre spokesman said: “To our eternal shame, we’ve had to hire someone off the telly to do a play because it’s the only way to shift tickets.
“Benedict has re-imagined Hamlet as a thriller where he and Laertes, now a grumpy doctor played by that Gollum bloke, expose the killer using brilliant deductive logic based on a few strands of stray fabric in someone’s cloak.
“Then they save Ophelia and take over Denmark before finishing on an absurd cliffhanger.
“Still it’ll be better than the David Tennant Hamlet where it turned out he was his own father’s ghost all along because of ‘time travel’.”
