Allan Clayton makes his mark as an operatic Hamlet at Met
Tenor Allan Clayton was in near-constant motion and almost always onstage. At a dress rehearsal of Brett Dean’s “Hamlet” at the Metropolitan Opera a few weeks ago, he staggered, capered, fell to his knees, leaped into a grave and dueled to the death — all while singing Dean’s difficult, vocally shimmering, emotionally shifting music. Taking a bow afterward, alone on the huge stage, Clayton looked slightly dazed, drenched in sweat and understandably exhausted.
“Hamlet,” which runs through June 9 at the Met, was a breakthrough for the British-born Clayton when the opera premiered at the Glyndebourne Festival in 2017.
Writing in The New York Times, music critic Zachary Woolfe said Clayton was even better at the Met. “His tone is sometimes plangently lyrical, sometimes sarcastically sharp,” Woolfe wrote. “Without losing the character’s desperation, Clayton now makes Hamlet more persuasively antic and wry — more real.”
In an interview a few days before the May 13 Met premiere, Clayton said he was both “a more canny singer” and more stable than when he first sang Hamlet. “It is a wonderful role,” he said. “But emotionally it’s very hard. It dredges up issues in my personal life which were true in 2017 and are still true now, and completely inform what I do onstage.”
His father, he explained, died when he was in his 20s; his relationship with his mother is difficult; he went through a traumatic breakup with a girlfriend during the rehearsal period for the opera. In short, his life had some eerie parallels with that of Hamlet. As he told The Telegraph in 2018, “an awful lot of difficult stuff got drawn on and dredged up.”
Now, he said, he is “better able to distinguish between the character and my reality.”
Clayton offstage looks very much like his Hamlet onstage: bearded, slightly rumpled, in jeans and a loose T-shirt. Friendly and funny, he takes the British art of self-deprecation to Olympic levels and is clearly prone to excessive selfdoubt. Just two months ago, he said, he had to lecture himself sternly when a dress rehearsal of Benjamin Britten’s “Peter Grimes” had gone poorly in his view (his description is colorfully unprintable) a day before its Royal Opera House premiere.
“I often go through, I can’t do this, it’s too hard, too stressful, and I’m not doing anything useful, like being a doctor or nurse or teacher,” he said. “But I sat in my flat on that day and thought, If I am not going to enjoy myself, why do this job?”
His performance was acclaimed by the British press. “His tenor has gained heft,” said John Allison, editor of Opera Magazine, in a telephone interview. “And he had the lyricism and the power, and a rawness and vulnerability that made his portrayal of the character as an oddball dreamer so affecting.”
Clayton, who grew up in Malvern in southwest England, began to sing at 8, in his school choir. At 10, he won a choral scholarship to the Worcester Cathedral School, founded by Henry VIII. “We sang everything,” he said. “Carols by Britten, work by George Benjamin, as well as the older things.”
Although Clayton modestly said he “wasn’t particularly talented at anything,” he was encouraged to apply to Cambridge University. “No one in my family had even been to university,” he said. He was accepted as a choral scholar, and began to learn about opera and lieder
while studying archaeology and anthropology. “Something just clicked in the second year,” he said of his singing. “I thought maybe I could do this.”
After earning a postgraduate degree at the Royal Academy of Music, work came steadily. Pivotal experiences, he said, included several roles with Leeds-based Opera North and his first title role, in Britten’s “Albert Herring” at Glyndebourne in 2008.
A small role in George Benjamin’s “Written on Skin” (2012) was Clayton’s first experience of having a part written for him. “To have someone write something for you, do an almost forensic investigation into your vocal ability, was thrilling,” he said.
Clayton is at an important moment in his career, said conductor Mark Elder, who has worked with him on several occasions, most recently on “Peter Grimes.” Clayton’s voice has filled out, Elder said, “but the strength and passion in his singing has not obscured its delicacy and gentle expressiveness.” The roles he chooses in the next years, Elder added, “are going to be crucial for him.”
Asked about this, Clayton hesitated. “Casting directors don’t know what to do with me, and I don’t know what to do with myself,” he said.