Thomas - Hamlet

ONP Bastille, Monday March 27 2023

Conductor: Pierre Dumoussaud. Production: Krzysztof Warlikowski. Sets and Costumes: Małgorzata Szczęśniak. Lighting: Felice Ross. Video: Denis Guéguin. Hamlet: Ludovic Tézier. Claudius: Jean Teitgen. Laërte: Julien Behr. Spectre: Clive Bayley. Horatio: Frédéric Caton. Marcellus: Julien Henric. Gertrude: Eve-Maud Hubeaux. Ophélie: Lisette Oropesa. Polonius: Philippe Rouillon. Premier Fossoyeur: Alejandro Baliñas Vieites. Deuxième Fossoyeur: Maciej Kwaśnikowski. Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra National De Paris.

Photos: Bernd Uhlig, ONP

(Tip for people in a hurry: this is a long post, but after the asterisks near the end, I sum the production up in a few words.)

This wasn't the first time I'd seen Thomas's Hamlet. I saw it in my pre-blogging days, with Natalie Dessay and Thomas Hampson, and again, ten years ago, with Franco Pomponi and Rachele Gilmore in Olivier Py's production in Brussels. But this was the first time I can ever remember thinking, at the end of any opera, that the excellence of the production and cast had thrown into such high relief the overall platitude of the work: 'C'est plat', said a friend hearing it for the first time. Or, as Tchaikovsky put it in greater detail, reviewing a performance in St Petersburg:

'... everything that Ambroise Thomas has written is smooth, clear, and uniform, but for that very reason it is so poor. A music specialist cannot but follow with great interest all the tricks which this composer avails himself of, in order to conceal his artistic impotence through dazzling technique, but for the majority of the public this music must seem extremely boring, colourless, and excruciatingly insipid.' (Translation © 2009 Luis Sundkvist.)

As Pierre Dumoussaud's conducting was equally smooth, clear and uniform, no extra relief came from the pit; the orchestra played well and supported the cast faithfully, but blandly. But from the outset, the chorus was clearly on spanking form; and the soloists, from the stars right down to the two young gravediggers, were top-notch all round. People might quibble, online, that Lisette Oropesa's outstandingly consistent, elegant singing is too uniformly beautiful throughout the range, that it's too healthy, too robust, not 'fragile', not 'ethereal' enough for the role; that the imperious Eve-Maud Hubeaux is really a 'high' mezzo, so some of (chain-smoking) Gertrude's notes sound uncomfortably low; that Teitgen is too monolithically, blackly metallic a bass, Behr's bright, clear tenor a notch underpowered for the Bastille... But all this is taking quibbling to hair-splitting levels. How often do we get a cast like this? Not one weak link. I sat there sincerely wishing the work had been composed by Verdi.

But nobody has quibbled at all, as far as I know, about Ludovic Tézier, now, at 54, at the pinnacle of his vocal and interpretative powers. He's stated in a recent interview how much he respects Krzysztof Warlikowski's intelligence, professionalism and hard work, and when asked what his favourite production was, among all those he's sung in, chose the latter's Don Carlos. Their partnership, their mutual respect, has apparently made it possible to transform a singer often, in the past, said to be 'wooden' on stage, into a great tragic actor, whether singing or not.

Warlikowski, a serious director, simply ignores the opera's edulcorated 'version' of Shakespeare's play, and plunges into Thomas's opera with deadly seriousness, as if it were actually the original (which he has also directed), digging deep into Hamlet's obsessions and anxieties in a searching, potentially harrowing oedipal psychodrama. One of the reasons I'm so late with this post (apart from simply being busy with other jobs) is that the result is - aptly for a grand opera - so spectacularly grand in scale, yet so rich in detail, that I've struggled to describe it.

Basically, once a glittering silver curtain is raised, the action evolves in a psychiatric hospital, with a single, giant, cage-like set of tiled walls, steel grids and windows. A green curtain at the rear left, the full height of the stage and usually drawn aside in vertical folds, balances a caged corridor jutting forward on the right, with gates for entrances and exits, where mad people sometimes leap and writhe in a crazy dance. There's a hospital bed (in which Hamlet, at one point, joins Gertrude), a table and chairs, where Ophelia and others sometimes chat and play cards, and a chest of drawers.

This 'madhouse' concept once established, anything can happen: we don't know what's real and what's imagined, by Hamlet or anyone else, or precisely when. In act one, Hamlet is old and his mother's in a wheelchair, watching a black-and-white film on an old TV; act two, a sign tells us, is set '20 years earlier,' but it hardly needed signalling, as we could have guessed at the time warps: at one point, in what I thought was a brilliant detail but others saw as a cheap joke, a red remote-control toy car buzzes through a metal door before the child Hamlet, still played by Tézier in his 50s, makes his entrance to confront his uncle. In other words, time is fluid: we're wandering back and forth in Hamlet's mind, perhaps sometimes in other characters'... 

But there's a lot more. Projections of the revolving moon and stars conjure up a magical, nocturnal, 'lunatic' atmosphere, and Hamlet's dead father is a white clown in spangled pantaloons hovering round like a mime, a wry, curious, but poetic and oddly reassuring presence:

'It faded on the crowing of the cock.

Some say that ever ‘gainst that season comes

Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,

The bird of dawning singeth all night long:

And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad;

The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,

No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,

So hallow’d and so gracious is the time.'

A fatherly refuge, perhaps, from the mental tortures of fairies and witches' charms suggested by Warlikowski's bizarre but beguiling, phantasmagorical parade of extravagant extras and sometimes puzzling ideas: veiled mourners and Danish officers in black uniforms and cockaded helmets; Ophelia in school uniform with a net of oranges she would later hand out, instead of flowers, in her 'mad' scene; the wild, on-stage saxophone solo by a musician in music-hall tails; the disconcertingly sardonic yet glamorous troupe of black players brought in to entertain the patients; the classical dancers (a woman on points in white, a man in black) mixed with the chorus, men and women, short or tall, thin or fat, bearded or shaven, also in tutus with grotesquely smudged clown faces... All this managed in the minutest detail: gestures, glances, silent asides, nails tensely bitten, cigarettes tensely smoked, everyone on stage an individual character... the whole production wrapped up and bookended by the same scene of mourning, only now, at the end, with Hamlet in his father's clown suit and hat, but spangled black, not white...

Obviously, this was too much for me to do adequate justice to: I'm reduced to mere listing. But those who read French will find an excellent write-up by Alain Duault on opera-online.fr, and in any case, for the time being the whole show is available free on Arte.tv. Viewers outside the E.U. will need a VPN to 'cheat' their way in, and it won't be there forever, but I've no doubt that afterwards a bit of rooting around on Google will throw it up again somewhere.

*****

To sum up, then. Basically, what we have here is a magnificent cast and magnificent production for a work that scarcely deserves the treatment. The production ignores the opera’s bowdlerisation of Shakespeare and treats the opera in depth, as if it were really Hamlet. Tézier and Warlikowski admire and respect each other and it shows in the result: a great piece of theatre, on a grand scale.

However, as usual, the only tune that haunts you afterwards (and it can haunt you for days) is one Thomas didn’t write. When I said that in a message to a friend afterwards, he asked me which one I meant. So I sent him a YT clip of the folk song. ‘Ah. I didn’t remember that either,' he replied.