Hamlet Hail to the Thief: a frenetic, gothy mashup

Hamlet Hail to the Thief
Aviva Studios, Manchester; until next Sunday; Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 4-28 June

Before this frenetic, gothy mashup of Hamlet and Radiohead’s 2003 album begins, an insistent rhythm brings the audience to silence, pulsing like a Geiger counter. Something is rotten already in the state of Denmark. This mood prevails, twitchily, nervily, for the 110 minutes that follow.

What a piece of work is this ambitious, slightly insane production – a filleting of Shakespeare’s longest play to under half its original length, then splicing it together with the drones, sighs and skittish rhythms of one of Radiohead’s bleakest releases. This idea has haunted co-director Christine Jones since the mid-2000s, when she kept spotting similarities between Hamlet and the tortured, violent lyrics of one of her favourite bands. (Yorke confirmed to Miranda Sawyer last month that the synchronicity wasn’t intentional, but he couldn’t shake the idea for this project after Jones approached him about it: “It planted a little seed in my head.”)

This edit focuses largely on Hamlet’s grief for his father, and his rage against his uncle, Claudius, a man who snatched power in a murderous fashion, then married Hamlet’s mother. Gone is the character of Fortinbras and the threat of Norway to Denmark: the only threats to Hamlet come from himself, his family, and later, the raging, grieving Laertes (an excellent Brandon Grace). Samuel Blenkin, recently seen in Netflix’s 2023 Black Mirror episode Loch Henry, is a fantastic Hamlet, mussy-haired and saucer-eyed, prowling the stage like a close cousin of Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner. He spits out every famous soliloquy with a punky, often humorous bite.

The set, by the design collective AMP and Sadra Tehrani, has the three-storey castle at Elsinore as its backdrop, struck with fabulous lighting design by Jessica Hung Han Yun. Musicians sit in windowed sound booths on the ground level, their drumsticks and guitar-picking fingers visible to the audience (Yorke’s voice occasionally peals through the dry ice, but he is not among them). Jones’s co-director is Steven Hoggett of the physical theatre company Frantic Assembly, and here movement sequences convey the chaos, desires and grotesqueness of this world. Early on, the performers whirl Fender amplifiers by their handles like suitcases, then collapse on the floor, a visual reference to the city workers prone on the pavement at the end of the video to Radiohead’s 1995 single Just.

The show sags in the middle, but the cast’s performances linger in the mind. Paul Hilton (Slow Horses) plays King Hamlet’s ghost on fizzing video projections, and his brother Claudius as an odious rake, trailing his long limbs around the stage, a cigarette often squeezed between his gnarly fingers. Ophelia (Ami Tredrea) is also allowed her rebellious streak against her preening father, Polonius (Tom Peters). She even gets to pinch Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” speech in her grief, tying her umbilically, tragically, to her lover.

Before her final descent, Ophelia poignantly sings part of Hail to the Thief’s Sail to the Moon. “I was dropped from moonbeams, and sailed on shooting stars,” she goes, before toppling dramatically into a neon-lit grave. Startling moments such as this, and others in the final, visceral duel, give this production its power, and reveal the method in its madness.

Photograph Manuel Harlan

Hamlet Hail to the Thief is at Aviva Studios, Manchester, until 18 May