That's great, Boss, did you manage to get some of the 10p-tickets?

I am getting insanely excited!! 

Feel free to open a new thread. We can use it later for those who have seen it already.

Here's an article from The New York Times (appeared today July 29/15 online) about Hamlet and some of the fans who are travelling to see BC in the play...

LONDON — Clare Newman was not taking any chances. If Benedict Cumberbatch was going to play Hamlet, she was going to be there.

The theater where he would be performing — the Barbican — was offering tickets first to its supporters, so she and two friends signed up for top tier memberships. The tickets were offered electronically to those in a digital queue, so Ms. Newman and her friends logged on simultaneously from eight browsers.

The result: Ms. Newman purchased six seats — three for the first performance next Wednesday, three for the final performance three months later. Although she lives on the Isle of Wight, about three and a half hours away, she will visit London three additional times, just to meet others in the global village of Cumberbatch fans, a vast network, created and nurtured by social media, whose most fortunate and determined members — from Siberia, New Zealand, Peru and all points in between — are about to descend on this city for what many view as the theatrical event of their lifetimes.

Mr. Cumberbatch’s appearance as Hamlet — a 12-week run that ends Oct. 31 — is easily the most anticipated event of the London theatrical season. Its lead producer, Sonia Friedman, said she believed it was the fastest-selling play in British history, with its advance seats going within hours.

“It is mad, and it shows the pull of the bloke,” said Ms. Newman, 33, a newspaper sports editor who, like many, fell under a Cumberbatch spell via television’s “Sherlock,” and who has since been working her way through his oeuvre, from audiobooks to “Star Trek Into Darkness,” while also making fan art in tribute in her spare time.

“I make no bones about it: I’m not the biggest Shakespeare fan,” she added. “But this is the classic play, the hoop an actor has to go through, and if it works — and I’ve got every faith that it will — it could make him the defining actor of a generation.”

Mr. Cumberbatch, 39, is best known for his television and film work, including his Oscar-nominated performance as Alan Turing in “The Imitation Game.” He is no stranger to the stage — his most recent roles were in “After the Dance” and “Frankenstein” at the National Theater here — but since then, the passion of his fan base has only intensified, driven by women who use Twitter, Tumblr and multiple other tools to share news, photographs and commentary about his live appearances and on-screen performances.

The fans say they find him attractive — even if invariably they say his looks are unconventional — but many also say they are drawn to what they view as a decency in the way he seems to conduct his career and his life.

“It’s a combination of his acting, choice of roles, and basic charisma,” said Ann K. McClellan, the chairwoman of the English department at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire.

Ms. McClellan, 44, is both a scholar of Sherlock Holmes and a fan of Mr. Cumberbatch; she is traveling to London with friends next month to see him in “Hamlet,” and called the trip a “destination holiday” akin to what some football fans undertake to see a Super Bowl.

Led by the British theater director Lyndsey Turner, this “Hamlet” is being developed with extraordinary secrecy — none of the principals would agree to speak about it, the only photographs released show the cast rehearsing in street clothes, and posters for the project feature not Mr. Cumberbatch but a small boy.


Ms. Friedman, who said she had not yet seen a rehearsal, would offer only the barest of descriptions of the project, saying, “It’s a closed room — that’s the process.” She did allow that the setting would be “timeless,” the running time less than full length, and the show “very accessible, very entertaining.” And she said she was thrilled that much of the audience is likely to be far more familiar with the “Sherlock” episode “The Hounds of Baskerville” than the prince of Denmark.

“I hope that, for those that have never seen Shakespeare, it will be really rock-and-roll, and really exciting, and that they’ll understand that Shakespeare is as easy to understand as a television show or a blockbuster movie,” she said.

Hamlet, of course, is one of the great theatrical roles, and has been played by many a film or television star, from Laurence Olivier to Jude Law. Shakespeare’s Globe theater currently has a troupe circumnavigating the globe, attempting to perform the play in every country before next year’s 400th anniversary of the bard’s death.

But the combination of the limited run, Mr. Cumberbatch’s devoted fan base (one admirer in Indonesia has a business selling Cumberbatch cupcakes), and internationalization of commerce via the Internet has made this “Hamlet” an unusually tough ticket.

“People are coming from Japan, from Russia, planning on meeting up in groups — they have been reading the play in advance, looking at films, getting prepared,” said Naomi Roper, a 37-year-old lawyer in London who runs Cumberbatchweb, a popular site that tracks the actor’s projects and public appearances. “Some of them are not only new to Shakespeare, but first-time theatergoers — I’ve had lots of questions about dress codes and that kind of thing.”


A majority of the seats were sold at full price last summer, most through an online system, with prices ranging from 30 pounds to 62.50 pounds (between $47 and $97). Some fans spent as much as 100 pounds for top-level memberships to get first crack at tickets, and others volunteered hardship stories about how they got tickets. Stefanie Boehm, a 19-year-old student from Austria, said she was No. 2,821 in line when she logged on, and said she waited three hours to buy tickets for the 1,100-seat venue. Ayako Nemoto, 37, from Tokyo, said she couldn’t get through online, so she called the Barbican 72 times before reaching the box office.

A block of discounted tickets — 60 seats per performance, at 10 pounds each — was sold last month in an online lottery. A final opportunity will be made available throughout the production: 30 tickets will be offered each day to those in line. The Barbican has said it is attempting to prevent use of tickets purchased through secondary markets. A handful of charities, most of them arts-related, have been given tickets that they can auction as fund-raisers, or give to beneficiaries; and four matinees are being held for school and university groups. And the production will be broadcast in movie theaters around the world by National Theater Live on Oct. 15.

For many fans, though, seeing “Hamlet” in person is the only way to go.

Courtney Bowden, a 19-year-old ambulance company volunteer from New Zealand, said she was conquering a fear of flying to get to London, making a trip she called “my biggest victory in life so far.” Lisa Siregar, 29, of Jakarta, Indonesia, said she and four friends have tickets but are still waiting to get visas. Sabrina Baribeau, an 18-year-old acting student from Repentigny, Quebec, said she was bringing her grandmother, who is trying to learn English for the occasion.

Others are willing to show up without tickets. Eleanor Thibeaux, 28, of Oakland, Calif., said she and friends were flying to London planning to try for tickets through the lottery. “If we get in, awesome,” she said. “If not, we’ll just go to Munich and drown our sorrows at Oktoberfest.”

As for whether the extreme interest might propel the production to a longer life, Ms. Friedman demurred. “I’d love it if it could, but we’ll see,” she said. “There’ve been no discussions. We’ll see how it goes.”

Here's the link if you want to see how it will look in hardcopy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/30/theater/benedict-cumberbatch-a-hamlet-whos-one-hot-ticket-in-london.html?_r=0

-Val

I do miss Clare too, and Rebecca! 

Thanks for the article! 

But again it shows the hype about Benedict's upcoming perfomance quite plainly. Unbelievable.

There are tickets available on the Barfbican site. Stalls in the back, 95 Pounds. Think, they were hold back and are sold now shortly before the premiere. Want to make some extra money???

Yeah. When the whole thing started the highest ticket price was 85 Pounds. For much better seats.

Holy crepe. That just pisses me off! 

I know they did the 10p tickets and all... but ugh. 

I even paid extra for my ticket because I ended up no. 40.000 in the cue and had to buy from ATG. 

Yeah, it's all about making some extra money shortly before the countdown starts. Not fair because it could happen that the one sitting next to you paid 30 Pounds less for the ticket.
"No business like show business", good one, Solar. Right to the point.