Ever wondered what it would be like to be inside Hamlet’s head? By fragmenting Shakespeare’s most complicated hero and patching him back together again using music for glue, Brett Dean has done just that, giving us a uniquely operatic perspective on the moody Dane and creating an exciting, colourful, and perfectly-paced telling of the play into the bargain. With its plethora of characters and sheer sprawl, Hamlet has proved a tricky beast to corral into musical form – Berlioz and Verdi ultimately shied away from the challenge – so Dean and his Canadian librettist Matthew Jocelyn, not to mention director Neil Armfield, deserve great credit that this new version proves emotionally powerful and entirely cohesive.

Allan Clayton as Hamlet. Photograph © Richard Hubert Smith

Hamlet, the play, can run for a gruelling four hours. Add music and you might easily double that. Coming together over five years, the breakthrough for the creative team was the realisation that there is no such thing as a definitive Hamlet. By granting themselves the license to roam across the versions – from the First Folio to the notoriously bastard First Quarto – they reduced the...