Hailed by the UK’s Sunday Times as “unmissable” and “the operatic event of the year”, Australian composer Brett Dean’s Hamlet, which premiered to rave reviews at Glyndebourne Festival Opera in June, is coming to Australia as the centrepiece of the 2018 Adelaide Festival.

Directed by Neil Armfield, who is a Joint Artistic Director of the Festival with Rachel Healy, the opera will open the Festival on March 2. It follows the phenomenal success of Barrie Kosky’s ravishing production of Handel’s oratorio Saul, which launched the 2017 Adelaide Festival – Armfield’s and Healey’s first – after having also originated at Glyndebourne.

^{Allan Clayton as Hamlet @ Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. Photo © Richard Hubert Smith}

In a four-star review of the Glyndebourne opening of Hamlet, Limelight Editor Clive Paget said: “Dean’s Hamlet is a rare thing, an authentic musical interpretation of a play that both enhances Shakespeare and is very much its own master. As an opera for today, it deserves to enter the repertoire.”

The Times gave it five stars and called it “a magnificent new opera”,The Guardian said, “New opera doesn’t often get to sound this good”, while The Spectator described it...