Depression dominates this Dane. We bear witness to a Hamlet light on glamour and unafraid to be unlikeable, often played with deliberately flat effect. Inner turmoil is wrested to life in soliloquies that seem less self-dramatising for being the only outlet for unexpressed grief.

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Distinctive histrionic insights make Gordon-Anderson’s performance consistently interesting – from playing the “very like a whale” exchange with Polonius as a cold assertion of power to the immature spite and performance anxiety that marks Hamlet’s treatment of Ophelia – even if those moments aren’t quite stitched together into a coherent reading of the character.

There’s more sympathy for less traditionally sympathetic figures.

Lucy Bell’s Gertrude is an innocent – a woman deeply in love, who both adores her son and is terrified by his behaviour, her anguish more affecting for its quiet intensity. Robert Menzies plays Polonius as an affable, intelligent, well-meaning courtier who is overprotective rather than punitive towards his daughter.

If Peter Evans’ direction had been able to get the nuance in those two performances across the board, it would have been a terrific production. Some actors are left to their own devices, though – notably Ray Chong Nee, who has the talent (and the resonant voice) for Shakespeare but seems too fruity and frenetic as Claudius.

While Anna Tregloan’s design can serve the tragedy well – placing the audience behind the arras with Polonius is an inspired idea – it also proves a decorative distraction.

The 1960s setting could do without Hamlet’s childhood videos plastering unearned sentiment everywhere, and the constant spectacle of snowfall on shagpile risks leeching attention from the performances.

It doesn’t matter that much. The ensemble is secure enough to deliver a Hamlet in which even veteran theatregoers will find something fresh – a feat in itself – and Shakespeare lovers won’t be disappointed by the performance standard.

OPERA

The Rise And Fall of the City of Mahagonny ★★★½

Athenaeum Theatre, until May 5

Being denied a stage for so long seems to have raised the sights and the ambition of Melbourne Opera. Surging out of lockdowns with impressive productions of Wagner’s Das Rhinegold and Die Walkure, the company will mount a complete Ring cycle next year, and in the meantime joins forces with IOpera for a swingeing, darkly funny anti-capitalist satire that has recently experienced a worldwide revival.

From Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny is a strange and compelling chimera of modernist opera. It’s usually interpreted as a critique of Weimar Germany, or the callous individualism of US society, but its vision of capitalism in crisis feels eerily prescient today.

It isn’t as well-known as Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera, and the Nazis are partly to blame for that. They idolised the sweeping mythic vision of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk (“total artwork”) and closed this “degenerate” show when they took power in 1933.

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No surprise there. The plot is a motley of social evil and disorder, and Weill’s haunting, jazz-inflected score, which includes Alabama Song (with its boozy refrain “Show me the way to the next whiskey bar”) was always more apt to be covered by The Doors than sung by brownshirts.

The titular city is founded by vicious grifters to leech off the populace. They form a corrupt elite and attract disgruntled workers from all over, including a group of Alaskan lumberjacks lured by the pleasure money can afford them.

Annoyed to find an over-regulated hellhole, rather than a land of leisure where antiwork reigns, one of them, Jimmy McIntyre (James Egglestone), encourages Mahagonny to throw rules to the wind, just as a hurricane threatens to wipe the city out.

Suddenly, human despoliation trumps natural disaster, and after a cabaret-style orgy of gluttony, lust and violence, Jimmy finds himself facing summary execution for the crime of having no cash.

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Suzanne Chaundy’s production brings this doomed and decadent world to life, with costumes, set and bespoke video animations adding to its cartoonish flair.

True, some chorus numbers come across more as am-dram free-for-alls than the disciplined anti-naturalism of Brechtian epic theatre, but the leads take command of its stylised performance and have the vocal firepower to fully unleash the show’s humour and cruelties.

Egglestone’s romantic tenor soars in the role of Jimmy and gets memorably shot down in flames by Antoinette Halloran’s sharp-edged soprano as Jenny Hill, his sex worker love interest.

The trio of desperado founders (Liane Keegan, Christopher Hillier, Robert Macfarlane) are sung with villainous vigour, though these parts are arguably better suited to musical theatre voices than trained operatic ones. And the ill-fated lumberjacks (Darcy Carroll, Fraser Findlay) as well as the capitalist Judas among them (Christopher Tonkin) all carve out distinctive supporting roles.

Perhaps a more frenetic tempo could have served the spectacle better at times, but the orchestra plays well and the discordant moodiness, syncopation and counterpoint of Weill’s music are a glory to hear performed.

The Heartbreak Choir, by Aidan Fennessy, Melbourne Theatre Company, until May 28
★★★★½

The Heartbreak Choir is heart-warming, sharp and so packed with hilarity it would draw laughter from a stone, yet there’s no evading the grief behind its comic brilliance.

Like much Melbourne theatre, its premiere has been postponed by years of lockdown, but it is marked too by the singular loss of playwright Aidan Fennessy, who died of a terminal illness in September 2020 and never got to see his funniest, and arguably finest, work performed.

The Melbourne Theatre Company left an opening night seat empty for him in tribute. Anyone might have mixed feelings about the gesture in the face of a play that’s such a gift to the living, which insists on the power of performance to unite and to console, and which stands as an exemplary instance of theatre – ars longa, vita brevis – that will long outlive its creator.

The action takes place in a CFA hall in a Victorian country town, where a small group of singers has splintered, taking a stand after a tragic event, from the choir at the Catholic church hall down the road.

Christina Smith’s design delivers a time-capsule of a space unchanged since the 1950s, right down to a portrait of the Queen and an ancient wall heater on the blink. And Maude Davey’s Barbara makes comic grist from it as soon as she walks onstage.

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The psychologist, reluctant politician and part-time choirmaster is an artsy tree-changer who’s lived in the country for a decade, and the type comes in for an affectionate roasting. Barbara mounts a series of fantastically silly vocal exercises, gets bamboozled by the heater and, in a sure sign she’s gone native, noisily lets one rip when she thinks she’s alone.

Davey anchors an ensemble comedy supercharged by Fennessy’s talent for writing “real characters”. Each actor becomes an essential spoke in the comedic wheel, and there’s a similar vibe to Louis Nowra’s Cosi in the way these quirky amateurs embrace their art, though it’s a finer play, with sharper observational humour and no full-of-himself narrator to patronise anyone.

You can’t help but laugh with and love these motley choristers.

There’s Mack (Carita Farrer Spencer), an embarrassing country mum with an outsized personality and a bawdy sense of humour, who makes her shy goth daughter Savannah (Emily Milledge) cringe every time she opens her mouth.

There’s Totty (Louise Siversen), the good-hearted but unvarnished head of the town’s historical society, with a voice that’d rip bark off a tree; and Aseni (Ratidzo Mambo), the heavily pregnant doctor, originally from Zimbabwe, running the local deli.

They’re joined by the town’s burly senior cop Peter (William McInnes), who auditions with a rousing rendition of the Western Bulldogs theme song, and his son Beau (Julian Weeks).

As the tragic secret that brought the choir together is revealed, they prepare to confront their debut at a fancy winery.

On one level, Fennessy has written a love letter to country Australia – the generosity of its people, the small-town gossip, its slowly changing demographic. And Peter Houghton helps to wrest the sense of an entire town into being, directing slick comic scenes with sinuously patterned pace and delivery and movement.

On another, The Heartbreak Choir is unabashed about the transcendent power of art; and it manages to be poignant and genuinely uplifting without resorting to sentimentality. Partly, that’s because Fennessy is so attuned to how ridiculous the shadows in the cave can look in practice, but it’s also the magic that happens when the choir does burst into song, the bewitching sound of voices in perfect harmony.