Brett Dean’s and Matthew Jocelyn’s Hamlet an important addition to opera: review

Music by Brett Dean. Libretto by Matthew Jocelyn. Livestreamed from the Glyndebourne Festival Opera and available on demand at glyndebourne.com

William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is one of the great works of Western theatre, but it has been translated into a creative and deeply involving operatic work, with a special Canadian connection.

The production ran June 11 to July 6 at Glyndebourne Festival Opera in England, with its closing performance livestreamed. It marked a unique collaboration between Australian composer Brett Dean and Canadian Stage artistic and general director Matthew Jocelyn, who wrote the libretto.

Hamlet the opera doesn’t attempt to reinvent the play, but rather, explore its characters and their motivations. Jocelyn seems perfectly aware his audience knows the story but, in reordering, he offers a dramatic immediacy, rendering the tale a kind of psychological thriller. It’s an approach that works on musical, narrative and theatrical levels.

This theatricality is apparent from the work’s opening, which replaces the original ghost-spotting of Hamlet’s dead father with Hamlet (Allan Clayton) in the midst of a soliloquy.

Many motifs (both verbal and musical) established here are used throughout the nearly three-hour work. In a wedding reception and banquet scene that follows, Laertes (David Butt Philip) warns his sister Ophelia (Barbara Hannigan) against getting involved with Hamlet as Claudius (Rod Gilfry) and Polonius (Kim Begley) make speeches.

Throughout all of these sequences, Jocelyn’s libretto, together with the work of director Neil Armfield and conductor Vladimir Jurowski, constantly emphasizes the connections between characters, as Dean’s dissonant, dramatic score offers both psychology and storytelling.

This mix is borne out with magnificent precision by a stellar cast.

Clayton, in the title role, effectively conveys both heady intellectualism and gripping anguish, his sinuous tenor easily shaping itself around Dean’s complex lines.

The Gertrude of mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly is imperious, while baritone Gilfry as Claudius is barely contained fury and ego. John Tomlinson, as the murdered King (who also sings the Player King and Gravedigger), is wonderfully haunting and uses his sonorous bass to stretch Dean’s notes across percussive passages with commanding presence.

Canadian soprano Hannigan, in her Glyndebourne debut, delivers a shattering performance, her Ophelia growing more unhinged in every scene until the famous “mad scene” shows her, dirty and clad only in bra, panties and overcoat, her voice lilting, darting, swaying. Like Hamlet, her character is given a series of motifs (based largely around the content of the letters Hamlet gave Ophelia), ones which Hannigan infuses with ache and feeling.

Jocelyn referred to the “reappropriation of text” in the intermission break, and how he incorporated lines from various version of the play published both during and after Shakespeare’s lifetime. In reappropriating, Jocelyn and Dean have created a powerful piece that, while appealing mainly to those already fans of the Shakespeare tale, has crafted an important contribution to the opera world.