Anyone who knew me when I was 16 will know that Hamlet Hail to the Thief – ‘a frenetic adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, haunted by Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief’ – would’ve been bang in the middle of a Venn diagram of my teenage interests.

Fair enough, I no longer live in my Hail to the Thief grey sweatshirt, and I’ve long since given up aspirations of becoming a scholar of Shakespeare, but who doesn’t love a trip down memory lane? Particularly if it involves existential dread, a climactic bloodbath, and a wonderful genre of music I will always refer to as ‘Complaint Rock’ in honour of Cher in Clueless.

The press release made it clear that this production was an alternative take. Full of words like ‘feverish’ and ‘dynamic’, the preamble had me hoping for something in the same wheelhouse as Northern Ballet’s adaptation of 1984 – a new way of experiencing a text, one that didn’t fit into a neat box.

A fusion of theatre, music and movement, wherein Shakespeare’s words and Radiohead’s music illuminate one another, this show would have blown my teenage mind. The knowledge that Thom Yorke had reworked Hail to the Thief to melt seamlessly into the narrative would’ve seen me clutching my A-level copy of Hamlet in one hand and my Radiohead-special edition of Q magazine in the other, thinking it had been created just for me.

Co-producer Christine Jones had the idea for this collaboration at a Radiohead concert in 2003, the year of the album’s release, when she was working on an adaptation of Hamlet. “I was haunted by the idea of them being in dialogue with each other,” she says in the programme. “Both look at the complexity of what it means to be human, to delude yourself and to be deluded by your government. To find your moral compass within the world.”

In 2003, I was 16 and finding my own moral compass (I was one of a handful of kids from my school who bunked off to join a local Iraq war protest in solidarity with the massive one down in London). I’d recently started to get ideas above my station, insisting we watch Channel 4 News instead of Coronation Street of an evening, and was therefore convinced that not only was I dead clever, but also that protest could really make a difference. Fast forward 22 years and it’s hello Doge, hello Reform, hello everything going to hell in a handbasket. But Hamlet and Hail to the Thief are still two of my favourite works of art.

The production blasts onto the stage with 2+2=5 and I can’t think of anything more fitting for our current context than the line ‘you have not been paying attention’. At times, I found myself playing Hail to the Thief bingo – waiting for certain tracks and struggling not to shout ‘yes!’ when I heard the first notes of my favourites, like the people who laugh a bit too hard at the jokes in Shakespeare just to make it clear to everyone else that they recognise them.

I expected something edgy and I got it, but it didn’t feel affected or pretentious. If anything, I think Jess Williams’ choreography and set design by AMP featuring Sandra Tehrani made the play more accessible, surfacing so much that can get tangled in the undergrowth of this sizeable text. The music is something else. I loved the new arrangements and the breaking down and reassembling of the album to tell the story. The two art forms spoke to each other and created something new and highly contemporary, a 400-odd-year-old text and an early noughties album sparking off each other to say something urgent about the world we’re in right now. I could really disappear up my arse writing about this, so I’ll rein it in, suffice to say it was everything I hoped for.

By Amy Stone

Main image: Romaya Weaver and James Cooney and the cast of Hamlet Hail to the Thief (photo by Manuel Harlan)

 

Hamlet Hail to the Thief is a co-production between the Royal Shakespeare Company and Factory International, running at Aviva Studios, home to Factory International, Manchester until May 18, 2025 before transferring to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon from June 4 to June 28, 2025. For more information, click here.