Øyen did not seek to stage Hamlet as a play, but to break it apart — isolating themes and resonances and filtering them through contemporary culture. Mel Gibson’s infamous phone rant became the raw material for a new “Get thee to a nunnery.” Richard Burton’s soliloquy was meticulously embodied by an entire cast, each word physicalised into gesture. Kate Pendry portrayed Queen Elizabeth I in dialogue with death — here embodied as a grotesque clown by Andrew Wale — while Yvonne Øyen’s Gertrude gave voice to the silenced women of Shakespeare’s text. Ophelia, portrayed by Emma Lloyd, was given the last word — a defense from beyond the grave, reshaping a tragedy long seen as inherently misogynistic.

The production was a cornucopia of forms: Butoh elements from Daniel Proietto (also performing as Hamlet’s ghost), a boy soprano intoning What a piece of work is man, and the Opera Children’s Choir staging their own surreal school-play version of Hamlet. In this world, Hamlet appeared in skeleton costume, surrounded by classmates embodying the other roles. A corps of dancers embodied paranoia and gaslighting, surrounding Silas Henriksen’s Hamlet in a world of physical and psychological pressure. Costumes by Ingrid Nylander heightened the mix of historical echoes and surreal distortions. The sheer scope of imagery, language, and movement made the work a veritable Gesamtkunstwerk, a “theatre machine” that pressed every resource of the opera house into service.

When remounted in 2020 as The Hamlet Complex Redux, the piece incorporated live cinema: a stabilised ARRI film camera roamed the stage in a single take, projected simultaneously onto vast wooden structures. This gave audiences the uncanny sense of watching a Netflix production unfold live before their eyes. Revived again in 2022, the Redux version became a verifiable box-office success — one of the Opera’s most ambitious forays into dance-theatre, and a landmark in Øyen’s ongoing fusion of stage and screen.