Hamlet Hail to the Thief: A fitfully thrilling mash-up of Shakespeare and Radiohead

Telegraph

08-05-2025

There can be few young misfits who haven't identified with the brooding melancholy, loneliness and madness of Hamlet. Likewise, there must be plenty of alienated types who find succour in the music of Radiohead.
From their 1992 debut single Creep onwards, they didn't just pioneer alternative rock but seemingly helped to 'mainstream' angst. Yes, they have their detractors, but in the eerie-cryptic vocals of Thom Yorke can lie, at times, an aura of existential insight as potent as any Shakespearean soliloquy.
It makes a strange sort of sense, then, to attempt to bring together the best-known tragedy in the canon with the jittery, haunting, disquieting music of one of the UK's most internationally revered bands. This project – a co-production between Manchester's Factory International and the RSC – doesn't raid the back-catalogue in easy pursuit of box-office gold, though; there's no teen Hamlet clamping on headphones to listen to a hit like Just ('You do it to yourself and no one else') – apt though it would be.
Instead, Hamlet Hail to the Thief does what it says on the tin, drawing from the more obscure but still chart-topping 2003 album whose title derives from a slogan protesting George W Bush's legitimacy – and whose feverish intensity and disruptive electronica seemed to herald a darkening world. Even then, the approach taken by co-adapters/ directors Christine Jones (who first had the idea) and Steven Hoggett, with Yorke providing key creative steers and new orchestrations, has been painstakingly sparing: the singer didn't want the text to segue patly into song ('needle drops').
However laudable that aim, the result is a hurtling experiment that only intermittently flares into brilliance. At its best, the evening (under two hours, sans interval) combines concentrated doses of the play with a distilled essence of the music that burns hard, and fuses dance-theatre with due reverence for speech. Often, though, the play sounds truncated and the music – performed live, with a band in a row of sealed-off booths – too background-ish and incidental.
The opening and closing sections indicate how thrilling the show can, and could, be. Amid a monochrome design scheme, black-suited courtiers erupt in a synchronised palsied frenzy, to a thrashing tranche of the album's opening track 2 + 2 = 5 ('It's the devil's way now…'). If we were in any doubt about the malevolence of Paul Hilton's manically twitchy Claudius, the neat, subsequent use of the slow hand-clap from We Suck Young Blood during his first address underscores his vampiric aspect.
Played, with pallid grace and some endearing gaucheness, by Samuel Blenkin and Ami Tredrea, Hamlet and Ophelia are given a touch more time together than usual – 'To be or not to be' is addressed to her, and movingly echoed by her later, and they ardently canoodle on the floor a bit. The repurposing of the ballads Sail to the Moon (with some Shakespearean lines woven in) and Scatterbrain, to bring out their separate, keening sadness, is sublime. More, please, where that came from. As for the incongruous blips of swearing: to bin or not to bin? There's no question about that.