Hamlet Hail to the Thief review – study of righteous anger links Shakespeare to Radiohead

The Guardian

07-05-2025

I n all the hype around the collaborators on this co-production between the Royal Shakespeare Company and Factory International, it is easy to forget what is at its centre. It is not the co-directors, Steven Hoggett and Christine Jones, despite CVs that stretch from American Idiot to Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. It is not even Thom Yorke, the Radiohead frontman who has gutted and repurposed the band's doomy 2003 album Hail to the Thief for the show's soundtrack.
No, it is a 425-year-old play by William Shakespeare – and a startling performance by Samuel Blenkin as the bereaved prince, who does indeed have as much to rail against the world about as Yorke and his band did in the aftermath of 9/11 and the ascendency of George W Bush.
It was Jones who made the connection between Hamlet and the Radiohead album when she was working as a designer on another production of the play two decades ago. Both are characterised by angry-young-man tirades against power, corruption and lies, but in this staging, the links between the two are left implicit. A world out of kilter … Romaya Weaver and James Cooney in Hamlet Hail to the Thief. Photograph: Manuel Harlan
What it is, in Blenkin's hands, is a study of righteous anger. With unkempt hair and hangdog demeanour, he has moral force on his side, arguing carefully, logically, exactingly about the hypocrisy of the uncle who has murdered his father and the complicity of the society that facilitates him. He is a voice of a generation exasperated by the failures of his superiors, his twitchy paranoia as real as the fury that erupts when he confronts Gertrude (an eminently reasonable Claudia Harrison) or enters a twitchy pas de deux with Claudius (a spineless Paul Hilton).
With Frantic Assembly's Hoggett at the wheel, this is a Hamlet which, even at a brisk two hours, finds time for physical-theatre sequences to embody a world out of kilter. It is in the frivolous gestures of a partying court, dancing to Go to Sleep, or in the way Hamlet becomes imbalanced by gravity when he tells his friends he has lost his mirth.
It is all played out between the half-dozen Fender amps laid out on an austere set by the design collective AMP working with Sadra Tehrani, and lit with brutal precision by Jessica Hung Han Yun, whose monochrome palate gets no warmer than a smoggy yellow. With so much angst, even Ophelia (an uncompromising Ami Tredrea) gets a turn at 'to be or not to be'.
And, yes, believe the hype: Yorke's arrangements are tremendous. Performed by a five-piece band, isolated in sound booths and accompanied with much reverb by singers Megan Hill and Ed Begley, it rumbles and twitches, erupting in great swells of electro-rock noise at moments of greatest intensity. Ophelia's derangement is expressed via the wonky nursery rhyme of Sail to the Moon; Hamlet's snowy return to Elsinore delivered with a falsetto Scatterbrain; and the murder of Polonius (Tom Peters, more well-meaning than fatuous) is followed by the roar of There, There.
There is a touch of the Grand Guignol in the spectacle and the odd narrative shortcut, but Hamlet Hail to the Thief works as a lucid, angsty revenge tragedy, played with clarity and verve. skip past newsletter promotion
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