Hamlet, as the old chestnut goes, is “too full of quotations”: in the centuries since its creation, dozens of its phrases have become part of our language. So how would Brett Dean tackle the daunting task of turning Shakespeare’s five act behemoth into an opera for Glyndebourne? Operatic practicalities demand the cutting of a high percentage of the action, so what is the essence of Hamlet-ness, and in what way might it be preserved?
Dean and librettist Matthew Jocelyn go for a highly innovative solution: they treat Shakespeare’s text as a cut-up, picking what they take to be the most important lines, phrases and fragments, re-ordering them at will, sometimes handing them between characters. The opera opens with Hamlet’s muttered “...or not to be”; the phrase recurs through the opera. Ophelia’s madness fits perfectly into the tradition of operatic mad scenes, with her two entrances conflated and interlaced with repetitions of the words from Polonius and Hamlet that have pushed her to derangement. Famous lines get traded between characters for effect or just for fun: when showing off how they can perform, the Players indulge in garrulous wordplay with some of the most famous quotations. There’s a nod to literary erudition with a gag based on the debate of whether it should be “solid” or “sullied” in “O, that this too too solid flesh would melt”; the treatment of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern has more than a whiff of Tom Stoppard.
Dean, Jocelyn and director Neil Armfield are in no way attempting to “update” Hamlet or “make it relevant”. Rather, they are treating it as a timeless story told in language that has become timeless; they spare no effort in elucidating and amplifying that story and the key relationships between its characters.
Those characters were performed by a truly exceptional cast, the most exceptional of all being Barbara Hannigan as Ophelia. In her mad scene, which became the centrepiece of the whole opera, she had everything. Vocally, she could hit ferociously difficult rapid fire peaks and swoops, or smooth the voice into heart-melting lyricism. She looked young and beautiful in the classic “English rose” mould. And her acting was completely persuasive, the most convincing depiction of a person becoming unhinged that I’ve ever seen on an operatic – or perhaps any – stage. In the title role, Allan Clayton portrayed madness in a way that was contrasting and almost as powerful, if perhaps slightly overdone: from the beginning of the play, he is consumed with manic nervous energy; it’s only at the point of Ophelia’s death that his sanity returns – just at the point where it is too late; he explores many corners of vocal timbre.