It’s taken a while, but Brett Dean’s Hamlet has finally arrived at the Sydney Opera House. After premiering in 2017 at the Glyndebourne Festival, then staged at the Adelaide Festival, New York’s Metropolitan Opera and the Munich Opera Festival, Hamlet, has been hailed as one of the most successful operas ever composed by an Australian.
But can Shakespeare’s most famous and arguably most studied work translate to Opera and prove there is still something rotten in the state of Denmark? And of course, the elephant in the room is how does Dean, along with librettist Matthew Jocelyn and director Neil Armfield, incorporate Hamlet’s s infamous soliloquy “To be, or not to be”? That is the question indeed.
I have to admit, I approached a night of Shakespeare at the Opera with trepidation.
Hamlet? Opera? It’s a pretty intense combination, so don’t expect to walk out with a spring in your step, instead, your mind is overloaded, if not a little fractured like Hamlet’s.
To thine own self be true
However, as once described in The Guardian, this production is ‘an ingenious reworking of Shakespeare’, not bad praise considering there have been 40 Hamlet operas written since 1812, and Dean and Jocelyn dug deep to deconstruct the play, while not losing the plot.
While self-confessed ‘tortured tenor’ Allan Clayton, starring as the protagonist, freely admits that learning all the music was ‘fairly hellish’ his Hamlet is indeed agonisingly tortured as he fluctuates between irrational madness and furious rage. Meanwhile, our own home-grown Lorina Gore featuring as Ophelia – a little cray cray at the best of times – is chilling in her hysteria as she sinks further and further into the depths of her own mania. Kanen Breen as Polonius is delightfully arrogant, as intriguing as he is dislikeable, while Rosencrantz (Russell Harcourt) and Guildenstern (Christopher Lowrey), the finicky courtiers offer much needed comic relief.
Though this be madness….
Performances aside, this is flamboyant, classic Opera at its best. The costumes are everything you’d expect, from stunning gowns, meticulously detailed in flaming colour, to resourceful lighting portraying an aptly haunting hulk-like white ghost, (Jud Arthur) to panelled walls and opulent doorways swivelling effortless back and forth.
The multi-layered score, led superbly by conductor TimAnderson, features ‘satellite’ bands positioned in the upper loges and a variety of unconventional instruments including a frying pan, foil, sandpaper and cheap plastic bottles (because they create a better sound when squished). However, at times it was little too clunky and unpredictable creating an uncomfortable ride and and itis a long one at three hours.
As for that infamous soliloquy, “To be, or not to be”, it is very cleverly dealt with in the first scene and snippets are scattered throughout, and “though this be madness, there is method in’t”.
Hamlet
Sydney Opera House
Until August 09
Tickets from opera.org.au
