Significantly cut down from Shakespeare’s play text, although still running nearly three hours, Jocelyn’s libretto takes the familiar language of Hamlet and relentlessly defamiliarizes it. It is also, thanks largely to the powerfully sung and sensitively acted central performance of Allan Clayton as the titular prince, a nuanced and compelling production of Hamlet. The result is a Hamlet that may seem aesthetically familiar to the seasoned theatergoer, but that in words and music resists the recognizable. Instead, it was Matthew Jocelyn’s libretto, with its disorientingly deconstructive approach to its source text, that gave Dean’s Hamlet its identity. In fact, Hamlet is the first opera I have ever seen where the most compelling component was not the music-which I didn’t dislike, but that, seemingly intentionally, resists becoming likable-nor the staging-which was stylish, but conventional. At the risk of sounding too candid, I want to caveat this review with two disclosures: first, that I liked Hamlet, the Brett Dean composed adaptation of Shakespeare’s play now making its US debut at the Met Opera, a lot second, that my enjoyment was certainly as influenced by my other life, as a graduate student studying Shakespeare, as it was by my position as an opera-lover.
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