By Benjamin Lee
At the Hay Festival, Benedict Cumberbatch, along with a group of other actors, came to participate in Letters Live. This event celebrates the dying art of letter writing. At this event, the actors go up on stage and read out different letters that have been written by people in the past.
Benedict took the stage and recited love letters between a World War II Signalman and his sweetheart along with tragic letters, and even some humorous ones. According to the footage of his recitals, Benedict did not just simply read off the page. He acted them out and read them with deep meaning. He read the love and tragic letters with a sincere and emotional voice. In some other humorous letters, he was a bit more informal; he had a voice as if he was a guest at a dinner party telling an amusing anecdote. In some photos, people really capture the emotion in his facial expressions and even catch him shedding a few tears while reading some of the more touching letters.
Benedict had the audience captivated. He really brings out the stage actor in him as he recited every letter. Taking on the voices of the writers is like getting into character for a stage performance. The emotion, the talent, the enthusiasm, Benedict proves once again that he is an amazing performer while also showing that he has a love for the letter writing arts. However, if Benedict did not bring any of his stage acting into this and simply recited word-for-word off the letters, the audience would have still been captivated.
According to The Independent UK, Benedict’s appearance at the event made this event the second quickest ticket sellout in the festival’s history. Peter Florence, the Hay Festival director, stated that Benedict was a zeitgeist. As we all know, this is true. Benedict is huge and still rising. This pretty much says a lot about the audience: most of them did not come for the dying art of writing letters but rather they came for Benedict.
I personally think that Benedict would love to attend an event like this. However, I feel that Peter Florence wanted him to be there more than Benedict wanted himself to be there. We see it all the time. Celebrities show up to an event for a certain charity or cause and suddenly everyone wants to go. The celebrity gets good publicity and more people get involved with whatever the charity does. But in these situations, do we ever stop to wonder if it is the event that wants the publicity and not the celebrity?
Referring to the Skype lecture with Lisa Benenson, we are all familiar with the fact that organizations such as Unicef keep a list of celebrities who they go to in order to give them good publicity. They even “retire” some celebrities from their organization when those celebrities are deemed no longer famous. For the Hay Festival, it seems that Benedict was the moneymaker.
Having Benedict at any type of event will surely sell out. Every seat in the house will definitely get filled up and they will have everyone’s undivided attention.
But is this a bad thing for people to use celebrities in order to attract a crowd? Not at all. If anything, it is a mutual thing. Being a marketing tool is pretty much part of the job description of being a celebrity. Marketing people always come up with the best ways to get people interested in things and it is smart of them to use the famous. There is nothing immoral about that.
It is fact: People love celebrities. As for Benedict, he loves acting. With an event like this, he can perform and enjoy himself. The festival gets there audience, Benedict gets to make art. Everyone wins. I wouldn’t be surprised if they asked him to return to the next one. Of course, that is assuming we are still interested in him by the next festival. As long as the Cumberbitches still live, Benedict himself will be in the media.
I find it poetic that Benedict is being called a zeitgeist at the Letters Live event. Letters were once the norm but now you hardly see anyone writing letters. Time passed and we moved on from it. Zeitgeist celebrities are the same concept. A certain celebrity in the media is the norm. But when time passes, people will move on. That is why we call them zeitgeist; they are what influence us for the time being. And eventually, time runs out.
But whether he will continue to stick with us for the next few years or if he disappears next year, we will enjoy his company now while we still have him.
