U.K. actor Benedict Cumberbatch made his hotly anticipated debut as Hamlet last night and his performance drew mixed reviews from critics.

    Dozens of die-hard fans camped overnight to snap up the final few tickets to see the actor tread the boards as Shakespeare’s tragic hero, said to be the hardest role in theater to master.

    The Daily Mail hailed Cumberbatch’s performance as “electrifying” and gave the production at London’s Barbican theater five stars. It wrote, “His Hamlet in a hoodie was electrifying, a performance that veered from moments of genuinely hilarious comedy to plunge down to the very depths of throat-scalding tragedy.”

    But The Times was less impressed, labelling the production “Hamlet for kids raised on Moulin Rouge” and giving it just two stars. It wrote, “Benedict Cumberbatch has all the energy Hamlet requires, sweating around the Barbican stage like an oleaginous electric eel, but there’s little subtlety in this performance.”

    It was critical of the decision to open the play with Hamlet’s famous soliloquy “To be or not to be,” saying it was “indefensible.” The words are usually not heard until act three. Summing up its view, it wrote, “It’s a wasted opportunity: pure theatrical self-indulgence.”

    The Daily Telegraph wrote that director Lyndsey Turner and designer Es Devlin “have created a lavish, epic Hamlet for the Barbican’s vast stage. ... Not perhaps since it held the barricades of revolution for the first performances of ‘Les Miserables’ in the Eighties has this platform seemed quite so large.”

    Wednesday’s performance was a preview and the play runs for three more weeks. The Daily Telegraph said, “Cumberbatch’s interpretation of the title role is going to shift and develop.”(SD-Agencies)