LONDON — A chronic theatergoer may be excused for believing that all roads lead to Hamlet. I spent my first evening here this month in the company of that Danish prince, who is being embodied with such compelling, thin-skinned agitation by Andrew Scott that I felt I could see his heart palpitating, and breaking apart, within his chest.

Mr. Scott was so authoritatively unhinged in the director Robert Icke’s anxious summoning of Shakespeare’s Denmark as a surveillance state — an Almeida Theater production at the Harold Pinter Theater in the West End — that he almost banished other Hamlets who have been crowding my imagination of late. But not quite.

After all, only two weeks before I had been on intimate terms with another, very different — but equally original and intriguing — Hamlet, given vibrantly morbid life by the American actor Oscar Isaac in Sam Gold’s radical new version for the Public Theater in New York. And it was hard not to recall the last “Hamlet” I had seen in London, in 2015, which starred Benedict Cumberbatch.

You may remember that Mr. Cumberbatch portrayed the brilliant, emotionally paralyzed titular detective in the popular BBC television series “Sherlock,” in which he was bedeviled by his evil archnemesis, Jim Moriarty, who was given chillingly psychotic life by one Andrew Scott. (Can the Hamlet of Martin Freeman, who played Dr. Watson to Mr. Cumberbatch’s Sherlock, be far behind?)