Limelight — May 2017

violas in typical Berlin Philharmonic style opposite the

first violins we had a good view of the stage as well. That

made the experience as complete as it could be, whilst

concentrating on not coming in in the wrong place.”

Sitting down with Jocelyn in Toronto, Dean and his

wife read through one of the standardHamlettexts – a

conflation of the Second Quarto and the First Folio. It took

them five and a half hours...“Every singleHamletyou see

is a decision-making process in the first instance, because

to do the whole thing is just so enormous,”was Jocelyn’s

first observation. Dean descibes the first decision-making

process as involving each of them writing down their five

or six most important moments and comparing them.“Let’s

view the page as a tabula rasa,”was Dean’s suggestion.“We

only bring to it what we feel we absolutely need in order to

tell the story. That way we chip away at this massive block

of granite until hopefully we reveal the sculpture.”

Although the finished libretto uses as little as 20 per cent

of Shakespeare’s text, perhaps their most radical decision

was to paddle in the murky waters of the First Quarto –

known colloquially as ‘the bad quarto’ – an imperfect text

thought to have been dredged from the memory bank of

the actor first assigned to the tiny role of Marcellus.

“It has proved very useful for our needs,”says Dean.

“It’s familiar and yet different. It is poetic, but it is a

lot pithier. It’s a lot shorter, it offers a different view on

certain moments, and it cuts to the chase in some ways,

which has been really important. Interestingly, ‘To be or

not to be’ comes earlier in the bad quarto, which helped

me get over a block I had with respect to that speech.”

Jocelyn’s libretto abridges and reconfigures, with motifs

chosen to highlight dramatic themes: madness, death, the

impossibility of certainty and the complexities of action. In

other words, it’s Shakespeare, Jim, but not as we know it.

As was the case withBliss, where Dean snuck off to

Philadelphia with his lead singer Peter Coleman-Wright

and conductor Simon Rattle to test preliminary ideas in the

Preliminary workshops at

Glyndebourne last year

HAMLETO

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