Hamlet
- Robert Beale
- 9 hours ago
- 4 min read
Carre, Barbier and Thomas, after Shakespeare
Buxton International Festival
Buxton Opera House
July 12-22, 2025: 3 hrs 5 mins
(performances on July 20 and 22).
“Etre ou pas etre – O mystere!” is how composer Ambroise Thomas and his librettists rendered the most famous line in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. They were working from a prose translation and adaptation by Alexandre Dumas, which was pretty free in its own right (the translations sometimes strike us as near-doggerel), but in 1868 that was normal for both theatre and opera.
Both versions were an immense success, building on a popularity of the role of Ophelia as given by the Irish actress Harriet Smithson earlier in the century - she inspired the Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique (and then, reader, she married him). This opera followed on the heels of Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette, by the same writers.
So it’s not quite the Bard as we know him, but uses a great deal of the original while adding two drinking songs and a mad scene for the soprano who plays Ophelie, simplifying the story into a sequence of tableau-style big scenes, often with chorus.
This Buxton International Festival production begins with the burial of Hamlet’s father – the gravediggers are to return at the end, of course – as Thomas’s music strikes a menacing note, and the coronation of Claudius is marked by the brass ensemble sounding from the upper gallery of the theatre. We’re in an indeterminate time, with generically modern costumes. Political parallels are indicated by the presence of shaded heavies on the look-out to crush dissent against what is clearly now a repressive regime. Masked gunmen appear later, and periodically, as scenes succeed each other, we see helpless individuals hooded and frog-marched away, to rub the point in.
Hamlet and Ophelie are lovers – there’s a spot of pawing and horizontal embracing, which for me never works in the theatre: you can suggest more by showing less – but at least that’s clear at the outset. Clouds and mist make a suitable setting for the Ghost’s appearance and its call of “Souviens-toi!”.
Then we see Ophelie as poetry-loving young maiden, against a kind of slo-mo wedding party provided by the chorus. Gertrude is revealed as the evil genius behind Claudius, while the Players relish their time in the spotlight; their dumb-show is portrayed by silhouette-like figures moving very slowly against a white screen, while Hamlet’s feigned madness follows his drinking song and lends a lighter touch before the tempo is whipped-up to make the climactic Act 2 finale.
In Act 3, Hamlet’s soliloquising is matched by an equally-weighty solo for Claudius, while Hamlet, learning that Polonius was involved in the murder of his father, determines to reject Ophelie despite Gertrude’s urging. Thomas gives us a trio for the three, exploring their respective emotions in rather conventional operatic terms.
Ophelie’s mad scene presents a new location, as tufts of leaves appear around the set and there’s clearly a spot of water somewhere at the rear.
The final scene brings back the gravediggers as a brief comic turn, then Hamlet’s soliloquy, before a fight with Laerte, all grunts and thumps but from which both men recover remarkably well. The chorus sings sentimentally for Ophelie’s funeral, before the Ghost appears again to prevent Hamlet killing himself, commanding him instead to kill Claudius and Polonius, which he duly does before accepting his future as king. Thomas and his writers did provide an alternative ending pour les Anglais, with Hamlet dying too, but this is their original.
Adrian Kelly, the festival’s artistic director and conductor of the opera, with his director Jack Furness, have made some clear and rewarding decisions. The music comes first: the score is renowned for its resourceful and often entrancingly beautiful scoring, and they have the Orchestra of Opera North in the pit (albeit with just 20 strings in total, but they make a robust sound).
The predominant feature of the staging, in Sami Fendall’s concept, is greyness and gloom, the better to stand as foil for the colour in the music, and effects are often conjured through highly effective use of light (Jake Wiltshire). The main feature of the set is a rising series of steps, providing three different levels on which the action can be played.
Buxton has history with Hamlet: it was done in 1980, in the early years of the festival, when a young Thomas Allen made a considerable impact in the title role. In this production the same is true of Gregory Feldmann, a gifted young baritone with a voice that sustains its power throughout and impressive acting strengths, seen from the first appearance of the Ghost (Spectre infernal ...) and later in his feigned madness after the drinking song, and his despair and regret in the graveyard.
Yewon Han is outstanding as Ophelie: the mad scene is a classic for a dramatic soprano and she raps it out with technical virtuosity and all-out emotion. Her earlier high spots are more to do with expressing tenderness and innocence, which she embodies with an appealingly gentler, warm tone.
Gertrude is Allison Cook, a real soprano falcon in the 19thCentury French style, with both pure high and incisive low registers, the ability to handle wide leaps from one to the other, and a great sense of the dramatic: she comes into her own in her scene with Ophelie at the wedding celebration and after Hamlet’s rejection of her.
Alastair Miles, an old friend of the festival, is every bit as impressive as Claudius, immediately believable as wily political operator and suspicious ruler, outstanding in the long solo in Act Three. He even gets a bit of panto-style booing at the certain calls (among the cheers) – a bit tough considering Gertrude is as much a baddie as he is...
Mentioned, too, should be Dan D’Souza as Horatio, a fine baritone voice which Buxton has done well to land in a relatively minor role, and Joshua Baxter, a mellow and very listenable lyric tenor, as Laerte.
More info and tickets here
