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Telegraph
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Hamlet Hail to the Thief: A fitfully thrilling mash-up of Shakespeare and Radiohead
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.
The Guardian
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Hamlet Hail to the Thief review – study of righteous anger links Shakespeare to Radiohead
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 Sign up to The Guide Get our weekly pop culture email, free in your inbox every Friday Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. after newsletter promotion
