Benedict Cumberbatch is starring in Hamlet at London’s Barbican Theatre.

Cumberbatch will remain in the famous role until the end of October after making his debut earlier this month.

Kate Maltby in The Times said Cumberbatch was a “thrillingly charismatic” actor in a “gaudy and commercial” show.

The Times was scathing, calling it “Hamlet for kids raised on Moulin Rouge“.

While signing autographs for fans after a show recently, Cumberbatch made a plea to fans to refrain from filming his performances, an experience he described as “mortifying”.

He wrote: “He [Cumberbatch] is trapped inside an intellectual ragbag of a production by Lyndsey Turner that is full of half-baked ideas”.

The Sherlock star, who performed to a celeb-packed audience on the official opening night on Tuesday in London, received glowing reviews but was reportedly let down by the rest of the show, directed by Lyndsey Turner.

“I thought it was magnificent”, Gatiss said.

And The Guardian’s Michael Billington suggested Cumberbatch could have been a great Hamlet if he wasn’t “imprisoned by a dismal production”.

For all the hype, critics agreed this was more than stunt casting.

“Cumberbatch admirers can take heart, his female devotees are entitled to swoon: in this trial of his acting strength, he emerges, unquestionably, victorious”, Cavendish adds.

Quentin Letts of the Daily Mail said that this was “a fine Hamlet in a patchy, occasionally puerile, production”. “It is a pity he could not have been persuaded to do his Hamlet with a top-notch outfit such as the Royal Shakespeare Company or an ace director such as Michael Grandage”, he said.

He wrote: “Full of scenic spectacle and conceptual tweaks and quirks, this “Hamlet” is never boring”.

Critics were generally impressed with Cumberbatch’s performance as Hamlet. But once the front-of-stage tableau opens up to reveal the vast reaches of Devlin’s almost photo-realist set, an Elsinore marked out by copious portraiture, multiple doorways. and enough staff to make one wonder where Hamlet goes when he wants to be alone, the evening gives itself over to a sequence of effects – the pre-interval wind storm is especially dramatic – that comes at the expense of the play itself.