ajhlovestheatre

HAMLET HAIL TO THE THIEF

Hamlet by William Shakespeare, adapted by Christine Jones with Steven Hoggett

Music by Radiohead 

directed by Christine Jones and Steven Hoggett

Aviva Studios, Manchester to 18 May 2025, then Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon 4 to 28 June 2025

running time: 1 hour 50 minutes no interval

https://factoryinternational.org/whats-on/hamlet-hail-to-the-thief/

https://www.rsc.org.uk/Hamlet-Hail-to-the-Thief

A mash-up of Shakespeare’s (arguably) most loved tragedy with one of Radiohead’s least celebrated albums sounds like a bonkers idea, and so it proves in performance. Hamlet Hail To The Thief is however a striking, unusual piece of music theatre that divides its weight equally between the original text, Jess Williams’s angsty choreography, and the haunting, sometimes thunderous, music, played ‘live’ and re-orchestrated for the stage by Radiohead’s Thom Yorke. If ultimately this Factory International and Royal Shakespeare Company co-production, created by Yorke, Christine Jones and Steven Hoggett, feels like a fascinating experiment rather than a fully fledged piece, there’s much to admire.

Jones and Hoggett previously collaborated on the stage incarnation of Green Day’s American Idiot for Broadway and a world tour, and at its best Hamlet Hail To The Thief has a similar sense of iconoclastic wildness. Rock music in tandem with expressionistic choreography lends itself extremely well to conveying the inner workings of people at the end of their tethers, which is something the creatives here completely understand. 

Where American Idiot gave the songs full rein though, this show uses the Radiohead contributions to set mood and establish background, and to accompany the movement, which is highly reminiscent of the work of Frantic Assembly, the groundbreaking physical theatre company Hoggett co-founded. There are no ‘numbers’ as such – this very much isn’t Hamlet: The Musical – but the music is an ongoing presence, by turns ominous then rousing, and Tom Brady’s band is cracking, as are the ethereal vocals of Ed Begley and Megan Hill, even if the booming acoustics in Aviva Studio’s specially constructed auditorium render the lyrics incomprehensible.

Jones has trimmed the Shakespeare to a lean running time -well under two hours- that hits all the main beats of the Hamlet story but, perhaps inevitably, doesn’t allow for much in the way of psychological insight beyond what the individual performers are able to provide. Some fare better than others. Paul Hilton’s oleaginous, chain-smoking Claudius is a masterclass in imperious paranoia and duplicity; dangerous as a cobra about to strike, he’s magnetic and utterly repellent. He’s also the ghost of Hamlet’s father/his own brother, rendered with massive distortions and effects by video on the back wall of the set, and bizarrely conceived like the villain from a none-too-subtle episode of Dr Who. 

Opposite Hilton, Claudia Harrison is an impassioned, superb Gertrude, in another performance that would work equally well in a more conventional version of the whole play. That’s equally true of Tom Peters’s Polonius and Brandon Grace’s Laertes, both of whom make strong impressions and manage to break through all the bombast and gloom.

Delivering the famous “to be or not to be” not as a soliloquy but as an aggressive verbal attack on Ophelia, Samuel Blenkin only gives us some aspects of Hamlet as a character: he brilliantly suggests the protagonist’s fury and disaffection, yet gives little sense of a rich inner life, but that’s not surprising given how much text has been cut. He also has an idiosyncratic way of pronouncing sibilants that recalls Sigourney Weaver’s much maligned turn in the recent Drury Lane Tempest, and proves equally distracting. The role of Ophelia has been punched up considerably, and Ami Tredrea lends her a distracted but tough quality that works well for this version, but she isn’t especially sympathetic, even when reprising the aforementioned “to be or not to be” utterance at the height of her trauma. 

Her death is ingeniously staged as a grave surrounded by blinding light opens up like a chasm in the black stage floor for her to tumble into. The look of the show is relentlessly dark: AMP featuring Sadra Tehrani’s set is a blank square populated by amps, speakers and a metallic staircase, Lisa Duncan has costumed everyone in deep black, and Jessica Hung Han Yun’s lighting runs the colour spectrum from white to yellow. It looks impressive but it’s not always clear what’s going on or who’s speaking, an issue exacerbated by the impersonally large space. I suspect the stakes and intensity may be upped when it transfers to the more intimate Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon.

Will Duke’s ingenious, monochrome video design, sparingly used, adds to the overall nightmarish quality. The confrontation scene where Hamlet’s recriminations to his mother are interrupted by the discovery of the hapless Polonius is accompanied by a queasily undulating trompe l’œil effect whereby every object on the back wall seems to pulse and vibrate…the sense of foreboding is palpable and unsettling. This level of theatrical bravura is welcome in a production that, for all its spiky edges and originality of thinking, is not without its longueurs as Hamlet-lite struggles to emerge from the literal and metaphorical murk.

It’s interesting that the RSC is involved with this project in the same season as they’ve had an acclaimed, mould-breaking Hamlet (which just completed a national tour) and are giving us the upcoming UK premiere of Fat Ham, James Ijames’s fabulous Black queer American riff on the fabled text which arrives in Stratford this summer. Hamlet Hail To The Thief isn’t entirely satisfying – Radiohead fans may be frustrated that there are no complete songs, and there are whole swathes and colours of Hamlet that go unexplored – but the marrying together of a play and an album that, despite being created centuries apart, share a similar sense of paranoia and existential ennui, is pretty inspired. You could probably get away with not being familiar with Radiohead’s Hail To The Thief album and still enjoy this, but I suspect that without at least a rudimentary knowledge of Hamlet, you’d be pretty lost.