Queensland Ballet's Hamlet Announces Itself on Brisbane's World Stage

Queensland Ballet | Talbot Theatre, Thomas Dixon Centre | Running 19 June – 18 July 2026

Leo Mujić arrived in Brisbane carrying the weight of three great men: Shakespeare, Tchaikovsky, and Saint-Saëns. What he built from that inheritance is a defining night for this city — and for Queensland Ballet.

Before the curtains even parted on the second night, the music had already taken hold. Drawn from the symphonic works of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Camille Saint-Saëns — two composers as geographically and emotionally distinct as the characters they now serve — the score arrived not as backdrop, but as declaration. This is what Mujić describes as the organisation of time and space: the stage belongs to the dancers, but the music is the architecture they inhabit.

A Choreographer Who Leaves Nothing to Chance

Leo Mujić is not a choreographer who hands off his vision at the studio door. In conversation with The Big Curious ahead of opening night, he spoke at length about his absolute involvement in every element of the production — from the precision of Stefano Katunar's stage design to Aleksandar Čavlek's deliberately restrained lighting palette. Where so many contemporary productions reach instinctively for dramatic colour washes, Mujić pushes back. "I don't like when the people go coloured in red," he told us. "There is only cold and warm, but it's white. It opens very clear perspectives of front and back." The result is a stage that breathes — clean, gothic, lit like a Northern European winter — and which places the full weight of storytelling on the bodies of his dancers.

His production vocabulary is what he calls neoclassical ballet: deeply rooted in the classical form, technically uncompromising, but infused throughout with the demands of contemporary movement. "When I go to the theatre in my own time, I like to see something I cannot do," he said simply. Queensland Ballet's company delivered exactly that.

The Collaboration Behind the Work

Much of the production's extraordinary coherence owes itself to Mujić's decade-long creative partnership with dramaturg and assistant choreographer Bálint Rauscher. Since their first collaboration roughly ten years ago — across productions including The Great Gatsby, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Cinderella, Carmen, and Pride and Prejudice staged across Europe — the two have developed a process that begins not in the studio, but in silence: listening. "We spend more time listening to music than anything else in the creative process," Rauscher told us. The six-month search for the right musical architecture — choosing not merely what to use, but what not to take from composers whose catalogues are already claimed — produces a score that feels, remarkably, as though it were written for this exact story. Tchaikovsky even composed an 18-minute overture for Hamlet, and its structural DNA runs quietly through the entire evening.

Edison Manuel Carries the Weight of Denmark

To perform Hamlet is to be onstage for almost the entire duration of a two-hour ballet. Soloist Edison Manuel not only meets that physical demand — he commands it. His Hamlet enters grief-stricken, already undone by the loss of his father, and the performance never once lets the audience forget the internal violence that drives every subsequent scene. Mujić has choreographed Hamlet's torment through the device of a large corps of masked dancers — his 'spirits,' representing the Prince's ancestral connections and fractured psyche — and under Manuel's lead, the effect is genuinely haunting. When the Ghost of Hamlet's father appears, the ensemble lifts him high above the stage — a foreboding, commanding presence suspended in the air — before Hamlet's fear gives way to the gravity of what his father is asking of him. It is a passage of choreography that communicates, in the way only movement can, the weight of that bond between father and son.

A Language for the Unspeakable

The great challenge of Hamlet in any medium is Ophelia. Mujić meets it head-on. Her descent into madness is rendered with an unflinching delicacy — flowers carried like relics, movement that has lost its grammar. Then comes the drowning. That same silk curtain — first used to conceal Polonius as Hamlet's sword finds him by fatal mistake in Act I — returns, this time in black. The ensemble becomes the river — swirling around her, lifting and lowering her body as she floats on the current. At the last, she is raised to meet the black curtain hanging from above; it falls, wrapping around her as she surrenders to the river. It is one of the most theatrically complete moments in recent Brisbane performance — the kind that stills a room.

Death scenes in this production are not punctuation marks. They are arguments.

The Stage as Living Architecture

Mujić's set design by Stefano Katunar works with a deceptively simple vocabulary — vertical elements that shift between forest, throne room, castle ramparts — allowing the imagination to do the heavy lifting. Performing in the Talbot Theatre at the Thomas Dixon Centre, without the fly bars of a traditional opera house, Mujić adapted rather than compromised. "The design is intentionally very light and open, allowing the dancers complete freedom of movement," he explained. "Ultimately, I think the dancers take over the space entirely. They become the living sculptures and the living stage design." On the night, that is exactly what happens.

Manuela Paladin Šabanović's costumes do everything a great costume should: they tell you immediately who is who, they carry the emotional weight of their wearers, and they are — particularly in Gertrude's procession of scene changes — sumptuous. The dark geometry of Claudius's coat against Gertrude's blood-red gown; Ophelia's whites dissolving, scene by scene, into something more fragile. The palette is deliberate, specific, and doing real dramatic work.

On Being in the Presence of Three Great Men

When asked what motivated his return to this material, Mujić said something that stayed with us: "I am in the presence of three great men — Shakespeare, Tchaikovsky, and Saint-Saëns — and I am trying to respect what they did. Not to use them as a jukebox, and not to use them as an inspiration, but to try to accommodate all the characters of Shakespeare."

That sense of stewardship — of art made in service of something larger than itself — is precisely what lifts this production above the merely spectacular. Mujić does not impose himself on Hamlet; he opens it, clears it of clutter, and trusts the story to do what it has done for more than four hundred years.

Hamlet is a ballet that carries the full weight of its source material without flinching. And in a city that has grown — in a theatre that was once a boot factory and is now one of the most remarkable performing arts spaces in the country — there is something quietly right about the fact that this particular production has found its Brisbane home.

Hamlet, Mujić told us, "should hit them somewhere — in the brain, stomach, the heart."

It does.

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Queensland Ballet's Hamlet runs at the Talbot Theatre, Thomas Dixon Centre, until 18 July 2026. Tickets at queenslandballet.com.au

Reviewed by Phillipe Blake, The Big Curious

All images: Photo by David Kelly