Colonials mess with Shakespeare and get a global hit

Hamlet premiered at the 2017 Glyndebourne festival in the UK to critical accolades before playing at the Adelaide Festival, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and in Germany.

"It just feels so great to take this work, which has been acclaimed around the world, such an extraordinary piece of musical theatre, and to bring it home," said director Neil Armfield.

Two Australians, composer Brett Dean alongside Armfield, took on the project with Canadian librettist Matthew Jocelyn, backed by Glyndebourne over its seven years in development.

"I think they liked the irreverent notion of a bunch of colonials tampering with the Bard," Dean told AAP.

Turning Shakespeare's longest play into an opera is a task that has intimidated some of the greatest composers: the spoken play can run four hours, so in theory an operatic version could easily stretch for ten.

It's not only very long - as the height of the Shakespearean canon, Hamlet is also a kind of sacred text.

So an adaptation that didn't work would amount to a very public failure, said Armfield.

This operatic production, which runs about three hours, deploys some radical editing.

Jocelyn's adaptation saw about 80 per cent of Shakespeare's text hit the cutting room floor, lines transposed to different characters, and famous lines such as "to be, or not to be" fractured and sung in unexpected places.

Dean's score calls for a sonic landscape of electronic sounds, a large chorus and orchestra (including a harp) as well as musicians performing throughout the theatre, not just on stage.

A viola player who has been part of the Berlin Philharmonic, Dean acknowledges his compositions are complicated - even he finds performing his work a challenge, as he realised once while onstage with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

"I got halfway through a very virtuosic and difficult middle movement thinking, 'crikey, I'm really pushing the envelope here'," he said.

But the composer insists there's method in the madness - ultimately his music is about expressing intense emotion, in Hamlet's case his brilliance, trauma and disintegrating sanity.

For such a large-scale production, the Joan Sutherland Theatre has been a squeeze, but this results in a psychological intensity that helps the audience appreciate Hamlet's state of mind, said Dean.

"The orchestra pit is very complicated, the whole theatre is kind of tight and small, it's really packed in there," he told AAP.

Armfield had already directed a lauded production of Hamlet in 1994 during his time as artistic director at Sydney's Belvior Street theatre, starring Richard Roxburgh as Hamlet, alongside Geoffrey Rush, David Wenham, Cate Blanchett and Jacqueline McKenzie.

"I had delivered it as successfully as I thought I was capable of, so the idea of opening that world up to music was very exciting," he said. 

Saturday's premiere stars British tenor Allan Clayton, who Armfield describes as an extraordinary actor and one of the great Hamlets, in his fifth (and quite possibly last) time singing the role.

Soprano Lorina Gore also returns as Ophelia, a role for which she has already won a Helpmann Award.

Opera is expensive and complicated, said Armfield, but it's an art form that moves people in a way few other things can, he said.

"It's got all these these moving parts, and when they come together, it makes this a spectacular and memorable experience."

Hamlet runs July 20 until August 9 at the Sydney Opera House.

Australian Associated Press