From the outset, it has to be said that Brett Dean and Matthew Jocelyn’s opera Hamlet is a masterpiece.

Premiering at the 2017 Glyndebourne Festival, it played at the Adelaide Festival the following year, and it was there that this writer first saw Neil Armfield’s extraordinary production.

In less than a year, it had assumed the mantle of an ‘instant classic’ (rightfully so), and its arrival at the Sydney Opera House, courtesy of Opera Australia, is long overdue.

Allan Clayton and Jud Arthur in Opera Australia’s Hamlet. Photo © Keith Saunders

Much has been written about the opera in the seven years since its world premiere and the way it allows the audience to peer inside Hamlet’s fractured mind. Happily, none of its potency has been lost.

Jocelyn’s deconstruction, reduction and radical rearrangement of Shakespeare’s original text is perfectly set to Dean’s layered score, which is in a similar vein to the work of composers such as Alban Berg or André Tchaikowsky (whose skull happened to be used as Yorick by David Tennant at the Royal Shakespeare Company).

Combining conventional forces with electronics and “satellite” bands comprising singers and musicians in the upper...