It's proverbial that there is a Hamlet for every century. As Jan Kott says, it's a play that absorbs its times. The Romantic era gave us a pale, introspective youth; the 20th century an animal trapped in the pitiless mechanisms of power. In the 21st century, the Prince of Denmark has become the random particle in a corrupted, dysfunctional and claustrophobic nuclear family.


Stripping the play of its larger politics reveals the powerlessness of its two women: Hamlet's mother, Gertrude, and his love object, Ophelia, are starkly shown to be male possessions, objects of exchange whose value rises and falls on their sexual conduct. Ophelia's own brother lectures her on keeping her virtue intact, as her virginity is a commodity by which her family honour and standing is measured. Her father is more explicit while ordering her to avoid Hamlet's wooing, when he tells her to "tender yourself more dearly". Gertrude's lubricity in marrying her husband's brother (and, unknowingly, his murderer) shortly after she is widowed is the ignition point of the whole play.

Female desire in Hamlet is dangerous, a threat to patriarchal authority. "Fear it, Ophelia, fear it!" Laertes says: but, as with all the other men in the play telling women how to manage their sexuality, it's his own fear that he expresses. It's the fear of this female desire, and most deeply, the fear of his own uncontrollable impulses, that leads to Hamlet's incestuous jealousy of his mother and his unconscionable cruelty towards Ophelia; and in the middle of it all, Ophelia, seeking only to be obedient to her father's and brother's will, is herself broken.

In Ophelia Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Daniel Schlusser and his collaborators have picked up this subtext of perilous sexuality to create a work that is part installation, part dance, part performance, part music. An opera, a work, in the broadest sense of its meaning. It's a co-production between Chamber Made Opera and Bell Shakespeare's developmental wing, Mind's Eye, which permits an experimental freedom difficult to find in the pragmatic contingencies of theatre.