‘Hamlet’ Review: A Princely Opera Usurped by Noise

Brett Dean’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s tragedy has its North American premiere at the Met. 

Jacques Imbrailo as Horatio and Allan Clayton as HamletPHOTO: KAREN ALMOND / MET OPERA

By Heidi Waleson

May 18, 2022 5:37 pm

New York

I was ready tolove Brett Dean’s “Hamlet,” which had its North American premiere on Friday at the Metropolitan Opera. The video of the show from its 2017 Glyndebourne debut was gripping, a vertiginous journey inside the protagonist’s disintegrating mind. But in the Met’s much larger theater, Neil Armfield’s intimate production receded while Mr. Dean’s cacophonous orchestra, conducted by Nicholas Carter, expanded into a barrage of sound. By the end of the long (105-minute) first act, when Hamlet confronts his mother about her marriage to his uncle, the murderer of his father, it had become nearly impossible to focus on the singers or the action.

Mr. Dean and librettist Matthew Jocelyn pared Shakespeare’s play to 12 scenes, drawing from different versions of the text and mixing up the lines—Hamlet’s first words are “or not to be,” a fragmentary reference to the famous soliloquy that normally appears in Act III. The audience is expected to know the basic story and experience it as Hamlet’s nightmare rather than as a straightforward narration. Familiar snippets of text leap out, not necessarily connected to others. Even in this streamlined version, many words remain, leaving the listener to try to seize and comprehend them as they go by, not always successfully.

But it is the brassy, volcanic orchestra that drives this show. Extra musicians in the boxes next to the stage create antiphonal effects around the audience; electronics provide creepiness for the ghost scenes and others, while a chorus of eight singers in the pit adds an additional stratum of sound. Much of the solo vocal writing is angular and layered into the orchestral texture; the listener is grateful when a musical section catches the ear, such as Hamlet’s descending scale as he tells Ophelia “I did love you once,” or the brief, haunting quartet that echoes Gertrude’s phrase “Mad as the sea.” Other leavening ingredients include the accordion that accompanies the scenes with the players and the gravedigger; the cluelessness of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is emphasized by making them a brace of twittery countertenors.

As Hamlet, tenor Allan Clayton is on stage in nearly every scene, physically and vocally expressive in conveying the character’s anguish and confusion as he thrashes around in seemingly constant delirium. Hamlet’s only point of stability is his friend Horatio (the sympathetic Jacques Imbrailo), to whom he can speak rationally. In perhaps the opera’s most moving moment, just before the final scene, he tells Horatio that he will win the duel with Laertes, yet his plain, fatalistic delivery suggests that he knows otherwise. The orchestration lets up on its assault for a breath, and the intimate moment carries. More of those would have been welcome.

The rest of the cast was equally committed. Rod Gilfry’s chilly, evil Claudius was mesmerizing. In Ophelia’s mad scene, Brenda Rae, smeared with mud and wearing only a man’s tailcoat and underwear, exploded with rage and sexuality. Sarah Connolly played Gertrude like a woman nearly catatonic with repressed guilt; William Burden made Polonius forthright and proper rather than comical; David Butt Philip was an aggressive Laertes. John Relyea brought a distinctive spin to each of his three roles: the ominous Ghost, the amiable chief Player, and the eerie, whistling Gravedigger. Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen and Christopher Lowrey (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) were creepily effective as Claudius’s unwitting tools.

Mr. Armfield’s production emphasizes the opera’s theme of mental disintegration. In Ralph Myers’s set, the panels of a plain 18th-century-style room break apart and are reorganized differently for different scenes; sometimes we see their reverse sides, as if we were backstage. Even the ceiling drops to create the gravedigger scene; it rises again as the room is reconstituted for the mayhem of the finale. Jon Clark’s lighting differentiates the supernatural scenes from the “real” ones; cleverly, sometimes the difference isn’t entirely clear. Several characters wear white-face makeup, adding to the disorientation. Alice Babidge’s costumes are inspired by 20th-century styles, with the men in black evening dress and the women in straight-lined, couture satin. Only Hamlet looks different, a creature apart in black T-shirt, jeans and pea coat, and Mr. Clark’s lighting zeroes in on him, the perpetual skeleton at the feast.

In Mr. Armfield’s direction, nothing is ever quite realistic, whether it’s Hamlet leaping around the stage like a child playing hopscotch, or the chorus lined up and facing forward, rigid as automatons. Then, in the final scene, the lights go on and we see where this has all been leading: Hamlet, set up by Claudius to die in his duel with Laertes, kills his tormenters—including Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who had it coming—one by one. Revenge, and his own death, are both accomplished, and in this version there is no Fortinbras to pick up the pieces. It’s a stark and compelling conclusion, and with a bit less enthusiasm from the pit it might feel more like catharsis and less like a relief.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).