Queensland Ballet | Talbot Theatre, Thomas Dixon Centre | Running 19 June – 18 July 2026
Croatian choreographer Leo Mujić brings the Australian premiere of his acclaimed Hamlet to Queensland Ballet — a production that is assured, ambitious, and already one of the most significant works staged in this city in years.
Drawing on the symphonic works of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Camille Saint-Saëns, and performed at the Talbot Theatre within the Thomas Dixon Centre, this Hamlet arrives with the full weight of its source material intact — and the choreographic intelligence to carry it.
A Production Built on Precision
Mujić, Artistic Director of the Croatian National Theatre, describes his approach as neoclassical ballet: classically rigorous, technically demanding, and deliberately unadorned. Lighting designer Aleksandar Čavlek works to a stark palette of cold and warm whites, eschewing the dramatic colour washes common to contemporary productions. The effect is a stage that feels both ancient and immediate — a Northern European gothic that never tips into spectacle for its own sake.
Set design by Stefano Katunar operates within similar discipline: vertical timber elements that shift efficiently between forest, throne room, and castle ramparts, adapted thoughtfully for the Talbot Theatre’s absence of fly bars. The result is a production that feels architectural — space organised in service of story.
Costumes by Manuela Paladin Šabanović are among the evening’s quiet triumphs. The dark geometry of Claudius’s coat against Gertrude’s blood-red gown; Ophelia’s whites dissolving, scene by scene, into something more fragile. Each costume tells you immediately who its wearer is and where they are headed.
Edison Manuel Commands the Stage
Soloist Edison Manuel anchors the production in a performance of sustained intensity. His Hamlet — grief-stricken from the opening moments, driven by a violence that is as much internal as external — rarely leaves the stage, and never once lets the audience’s attention drift.
Mujić has externalised Hamlet’s torment through a corps of masked dancers: spirits representing the Prince’s ancestral connections and psychological fractures. When the Ghost of Hamlet’s father appears, the ensemble lifts him high above the stage — suspended, commanding — before Hamlet’s grief gives way to the weight of what is being asked of him. It is choreography that achieves, in pure movement, what Shakespeare achieves in language.
The Ophelia Scenes Demand Attention
The production’s most striking sequence belongs to Ophelia. Her descent into madness — rendered with precision and restraint — gives way to a drowning scene of real theatrical invention. The silk curtain first introduced in Act I, where it conceals Polonius as Hamlet’s sword finds him by fatal mistake, returns in black for Act II. The ensemble becomes the river, lifting and lowering Ophelia’s body as she surrenders to the current. At the last, she is raised to meet the curtain as it falls around her. It is a scene that stills the room.
A Milestone for Queensland Ballet
Much of the production’s coherence reflects the decade-long creative partnership between Mujić and dramaturg Bálint Rauscher, who together spent six months shaping the musical architecture from Tchaikovsky and Saint-Saëns before a step was choreographed. The discipline shows. This Hamlet moves with the confidence of a production that knows exactly what it wants to say — and exactly how to say it.
Under Artistic Director Ivan Gil-Ortega, Queensland Ballet continues to bring world-class creative talent to Brisbane. With Mujić’s Hamlet, the company has produced something that stands alongside the best of what this city’s cultural institutions have offered.
Brisbane doesn’t get productions like this often. When it does, you go.
Queensland Ballet’s Hamlet | Talbot Theatre, Thomas Dixon Centre
19 June – 18 July 2026 | Tickets at queenslandballet.com.au
Reviewed by Phillipe Blake | All images: Photo by David Kelly
