As any opera is the sum of its parts – music, story, words, setting, direction and acting – so is its creation. And the fact that Australian theatre director Neil Armfield was an early part of the team creating Hamlet with composer Brett Dean and librettist Matthew Jocelyn shouldn’t be overlooked.
For one of the key shifts in the opera from its Shakespearean origins is that Horatio is established as Hamlet’s best mate before they climb Elsinore’s battlements together to encounter the Ghost of Old Hamlet. Armfield may well have played a role here, for his memorable 1990s production of the play augmented Horatio’s presence extensively – as an earlier Rustaveli production of Richard III at Armfield’s theatre had done with the character of Richmond, clearly studying to be Henry VII. I even thought, initially, that they had used Samuel Dundas' Horatio on the Opera Australia programme cover rather than Allan Clayton’s fully inhabited, shreds and patches Hamlet, a role he’s revisiting for the fourth time, but this turns out not to have been the case.
Such radical transliterations have the profound effect of intensifying the drama, especially in the first half, when you can barely draw breath between high histrionics, deep emotions and psychological insights into the characters of Hamlet, Ophelia (Lorena Gore), Gertrude (Catherine Carby) and Polonius (Kanen Breen).
Much thought has gone into those psychological insights – with notable restraint by Dean, whose first opera, Bliss, was undoubtedly over-orchestrated. So that most famous soliloquy, which now starts “...or not to be. To be... ay, there's the point” courtesy of the First Folio, follows an opening to the opera that’s as low-key orchestrally as the Ring Cycle, and comes accompanied only by the extended vocal technique of singers in the theatre’s balconies. They feel as though they’re inside Hamlet’s head.
Percussive bow strokes softly augment the pain of Ophelia’s revelation of Hamlet’s “piteous and profound sighs” as he’s considering the end of his being. And Hamlet’s “Alas, poor Yorick!” is no longer hackneyed as we sense the Prince’s genuine sorrow. The vulnerability of this once-loving pair is constantly apparent.
Not that Dean holds back elsewhere. Ophelia’s ‘madness’ (which cuts short odd cries of “Laertes for King” from the chorus) gets appropriate orchestration from Dean while never denying Gore her vocally athletic place in the lunar cycle. And the banshees of the chorus spectrally underline the King’s multiple deaths by sword, poison and (did we really need?) strangulation.
Meanwhile, Carby’s stately delivery of a dark description of Ophelia’s muddy demise – nothing pre-Raphaelite about it – justifies the first show of emotion by a rather callow Laertes. Could Hamlet’s fatalism as he considers “the fall of a sparrow” and his own now-desired death have been touched by a borrowing of Bernstein’s B7 chord at the start of Somewhere?
Throughout, Allan Clayton’s threat to retire from his “mammoth” role after Sydney is a worry. The lightness of his English tenor, even in its upper registers, is what Dean had in his ears when writing the part, and his ability to show himself thinking through Hamlet’s dilemmas is the essence of the character, in play or opera.
Mammoth also were the demands on the orchestra and its often inter-linked chorus. Conductor Tim Anderson was there as a rehearsal pianist when Hamlet was created and he brought that understanding to the mighty task of delivering its complex score.
This review was updated on 24th July when it was brought to our notice that the OA programme cover did not feature Samuel Dundas.
