Met’s new ‘Hamlet’: To be or not to be true to the text
NEW YORK ( AP) — Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, all right, but not as Shakespeare imagined. No Norwegian prince arrives to seize the Danish throne. And to be or not to be is not the question.
So it goes in the latest operatic adaptation of the most famous play in the English language. “Hamlet,” with music by Brett Dean and libretto by Matthew Jocelyn, opens at the Metropolitan Opera on Friday, the final new production in the company’s comeback- from- COVID season.
This is “Hamlet” as you’ve never heard it, set to an orchestral score that includes an accordion, tinfoil, plastic bottles, sandpaper and stones knocked together.
And Jocelyn’s version of the play sounds at times as if he’d taken the various texts that survive and put them through a Mixmaster, even shifting lines away from one character and giving them to another. It’s enough to give Shakespeare purists fits.
Yet to paraphrase a line from the play, there’s method in his madness.
“I told Brett at the outset there’s no such thing as ‘Hamlet,’” Jocelyn said in an interview. “There were three versions published in his lifetime and every production has always been a conflation. It felt to me that if we went back to the original sources we would have the raw material to make our own compilation, but in a more radical way.”
Tenor Allan Clayton, who performed the title role at the work’s 2017 premiere at England’s Glyndebourne Festival and is repeating it at the Met, said that “what Matthew has done very cleverly is to upend some of the expectations.
“Because the benefit of doing ‘ Hamlet’ is that people can say, ‘Oh, I’ll come and see that,’” Clayton said. “They’ve got a way into it, as opposed to any other contemporary opera which might seem less approachable. He takes that expectation and he doesn’t destroy it completely, but he sort of throws curveballs in.”
For example, Clayton, said in the opera “My first line is “… Or not to be,” and the audience goes, ‘Oh, wait, that doesn’t come in until much later.’”
And when Hamlet does eventually deliver that soliloquy, it’s not the familiar version but rather based on the first published text of the play, the disputed First Quarto.
So instead of beginning: “To be or not to be: that is the question,” we get “...or not to be. To be....ay, there’s the point.” And later, instead of “To die; to sleep .. perchance to dream! Ay there’s the rub,” we hear “To die, to sleep - is that all? Ay, all. No! To dream - ay, there it goes.”