To see or not to see celebrity

Benedict Cumberbatch has begged fans to stop filming him on stage as Hamlet. Photo / AP

Opinion

Famous faces may be box office gold in the theatre or on TV, but familiarity breeds contempt.

As a 6-year-old, I was taken to see Laurence Olivier's Henry V in a small cinema in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Whereas the notion of anyone being forced to eat leeks was poignant enough to bore me to tears, my parents were more dismayed by the student giggles prompted by Olivier's "Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more." Shakespeare's words may well have seemed hackneyed to anyone in their early 20s, but that wasn't why they were laughing. They were laughing because Olivier was a Big Deal. They were laughing because celebrity is a titter-provoking business that makes adolescents of us all.

Which is why I won't be going to see Benedict Cumberbatch in Hamlet. Not that I could even if I wanted to: the Sherlock star's 12-week run at London's Barbican sold out within minutes almost a year before the curtain rose. Had any other big-name star been playing the Danish prince, tickets would doubtless have sold out as fast. "Cumberbatch-mania", after all, is just a strand of celebrity mania and back in 2009 I recall a similar hysteria surrounding Jude Law's Hamlet at the Donmar.

On that occasion, I was curious enough to go and see what the fuss was about, and sat through 90 minutes of Jude Law being Jude Law - in a prettily rumpled state - before vowing never again to see any play "headlined" by a big name. Former Spectator editor Matthew d'Ancona pointed out at the time that Law was "too delighted to be Jude Law to ask the question 'To be or not to be' with any conviction".

It sounds like audience members themselves are too delighted to be watching Cumberbatch up close (many through their camera-phones) to enjoy any conviction he may have. The little red lights peppering the audience are just a symptom of a wider problem he can't control: namely, that we are no longer capable of suspending disbelief long enough to enjoy a play, film or TV series starring a famous actor.

We now know enough about every medium - to big-name actor's personal lives and political proclivities to halt our imagination in its tracks. I'm incapable of watching Tom Cruise on screen these days without being reminded of his wacky beliefs and yoghurt girlfriends (each with a fixed sell-by date). Any on-screen sighting of George Clooney now fills my cerebral cortex with clutter of the circus-like Venetian wedding and presidential ambition variety - and the Ryans (Reynolds or Gosling) bring on six-pack fatigue of exactly the kind I'd get leafing through Men's Health.

With Hollywood's frenzied publicity machines scattergunning audiences with information about how famous actors have prepared for their roles, even the best-played part is diluted. Was anybody really able to watch Bradley Cooper in American Sniper without thinking of the 6000-calorie-a-day deadlifting and squatting regimen the actor embarked upon in order to play Navy Seal Chris Kyle?

I wonder how much TV's second Golden Age is down to a concerted decision on the part of directors not to use overly famous casts.

Thanks to Cumberbatch-mania, I, for one, couldn't watch Sherlock's excellent first season again with anywhere near the same enjoyment that I have repeatedly gained from my West Wing box set over the years.

And however unfair this is on a group of actors who are mostly deserving of their exhausting hype, it's still more unfair on me, who was only ever after a little escapism.