‘Like being thrown down a staircase’: Thom Yorke’s Shakespeare mash-up

Photograph by Suki Dhanda

Samuel Blenkin is Hamlet. He and James Cooney and Felipe Pacheco – Rosencrantz and Guildenstern respectively – are speaking and dancing in a scene which will form part of a new version of Shakespeare’s tragedy – Hamlet Hail to the Thief – that opens in Manchester today. What’s it going to be like? I ask Jones. “One of the cast said it’s like being thrown down a staircase,” she says.

Hamlet Hail to the Thief distills the play and combines it with Hail to the Thief, Radiohead’s jittery, paranoid 2003 album, to create a 90 minute-long theatrical event packed with music and movement. The blurb uses words like “frenetic”, “hectic” and “feverish”. In rehearsal, you get the details, but not the sweep. Still, nothing is quite what you might expect. Shakespeare’s words are there but sliced and edited. I hear Radiohead chords, but no full songs. After his run-through, Blenkin, who has a humorous, quicksilver presence – you’d call it Puck-like if that wasn’t the wrong play – moves to the piano. A gifted singer-songwriter as well as an actor, he plays chords softly as four other actors move together and Ami Tredrea, as Ophelia, in Adidas shorts and a vest, steps up onto a different Fender speaker. “When she falls, it’s unexpected, and you’re caught out, like ‘oh are we too late’,” says Hoggett to the group.

As I’m watching, I’m joined by Thom Yorke, who materialises beside me without sound, like a cat (or a ghost). We are talking amiably about how music weaves in and out of the production – “sometimes silence is loaded,” he says – when something happens. Tredrea sings.

Just two chiming, bell-like sounds – “I will” or “I was” or perhaps “and I”; it’s so mesmerising that I don’t take notes – and the air changes. The counting and the coordination and the discussion of where hands should be placed and which foot to turn on and the quiet chords in the background all do something together: Ophelia sings and falls back, and the moment fuses, snaps like magnets into place. The room holds its breath. It is magical.

Jones first thought about the interplay between Hamlet and Hail to the Thief over 20 years ago, in the mid-2000s. She was working on a different production of Hamlet and writing out the text – this is sometimes how she likes to engage with words – while listening to Hail to the Thief at the same time. She found herself struck by the coincidences and similarities, she says: “It’s the devil’s way [a lyric from the album track 2+2=5], and the witching hour [from The Gloaming], Are you such a dreamer to put the world to rights? [2+2=5]. Both Hamlet and Hail to the Thief start with a question.” None of this, of course, was intentional. “I can confirm that Hamlet was not in our minds when we made the record,” says Yorke.

Yorke, Hoggett and Jones are sitting at one of the white tables, while the cast get their lunch. American-Canadian Jones has a calm, almost dreamy presence; Hoggett, from Huddersfield, is serious but also funny; Yorke, wry and thoughtful. They’re all absorbed in and articulate about this new venture. (“Did you call Hail to the Thief twitchy?” says Hoggett. “This is a twitchy show.”)

Jones is a multidisciplinary theatre designer and director who’s worked with David Byrne and on La Traviata. Hoggett is known for founding the physical theatre company Frantic Assembly and his movement direction of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Yorke is the lead singer of Radiohead, and the Smile, with Radiohead bandmate Jonny Greenwood. He is world-famous, but within this production, all carry equal status, and this has been carefully engineered by Yorke, Hoggett says to me later. He turns up every day to do the work, he quiets the unnecessary noise and flappery that his fame entails. Modern theatre often throws its doors open, offering access. Yorke has refused most of this, including, he tells me, a BBC crew that turned up and only wanted to talk Radiohead. (His reaction: “Fuck off!”) He says no a lot.

He did not say no to Jones, however, when she approached him with her idea. He thought about it.

“I don’t not subscribe to the synchronicity thing,” says Yorke. “You know, the one about The Wizard of Oz and Dark Side of the Moon ... [that] you watch a movie, turn the sound down, put on another soundtrack and something is revealed ... But obviously, my initial reaction was, this is Hamlet, therefore it’s sacrosanct, it’s untouchable. You can’t. But the idea didn’t go away. It planted a little seed in my head.”

He thought about what he didn’t want if Hail to the Thief was used with Hamlet. Certain songs appearing in certain ways. “Needle drops”, where a track is played, perhaps in its entirety, to illustrate a significant moment: “I don’t really much enjoy theatre where the music is used like that,” he says. But he was interested in the idea of two levels of performance going on, one theatrical and one musical. “So, a band playing, but rather than an orchestra in a pit, actually playing. Not playing as a covers band.” He sat down and considered which melody from the album might work where, which lyric, which little sound.

And then, when they started working on the production, all his ideas were thrown away. As were Jones’s and Hoggett’s. (Jones had thought, for example, that some of Hail to the Thief’s tracks might be “themes, like, that’s the ghost’s theme, that’s Polonius’s family’s theme, or Myxomatosis belongs with Ophelia’s madness, because it’s such a mad song. But no.”) Actually, much of the creation of Hamlet Hail to the Thief has been a process of realising what isn’t wanted. Not just for Yorke, but for all of them.

At one point, fairly early in the process, they decided to have a bash at doing the whole thing, the speeches and the dancing and the music being made by the band together in the same room. (I’m reminded of a scene from the film Spencer, where a string quartet, playing music composed by Jonny Greenwood, creates the noise indicating Princess Diana’s plummeting mental state, while the royal family munches through a formal dinner, right next to the cacophony.) It really didn’t work.

“It was a disaster,” says Yorke, mildly. “And there was this endless stream of people I didn’t know were involved, coming in at exactly the wrong moment.”

“Oh, hi!” Hoggett recalls. “Hi Diane, from Burberry.”

After that, they realised that the production had to close ranks and that they needed to work on its elements separately. Yorke set up in another rehearsal room. Before our interview, I pop into this space, on a different floor of the building. In the manner of bands playing a big concert, there is a large mixing desk facing the musicians. A two-tiered scaffolding structure takes up the back wall. Each musician will be in “an enclosed booth”, says Yorke, “like that film with Toby Jones – Berberian Sound Studio.” And here they are, five of them operating on what we might call ground level, in individual pods, packed with instruments and computers. Above them, on the next tier of scaffolding, are two singers, cool and alone.

One musician is also the musical director, who beats time (the others can see him on monitors). It looks great, but compared to the human-ness of the dancing and text-work in the other room, seems very dependent on electrics and wiring. “It’s always the same with bands,” says Yorke. “It takes one person to step on a cable, or to pull out a plug, and everything goes wrong.”

Anyway, the scaffolding brings us to another part of the production: how it will look. The sceneographer is Sadra Tehrani and the visual references include the angular portraits of Egon Schiele, Joseph Beuys’s felt-blanket-and-live-coyote performance piece I Love America and America Loves Me, and Robert Longo’s charcoal drawings of business people jerking their bodies in interior agony. The lighting is designed so that people seem to emerge and then disappear. “We talked about carving the show out of the dark,” says Hoggett.

God, there are so many different elements to this Hamlet. So many moving parts. How are they all staying so calm?

“The thing keeping me awake at night was the architecture of it,” says Yorke. “Now there’s a structure, so it’s OK. Then it’s like, do we put that instrument in here? Do we come in later? Do you need us to pause here? It’s the same when you’re recording a song. Once you’ve got a backbone, you can add and take away. A classic example is the Beatles’ A Day in the Life. Recorded with an acoustic guitar, but you wouldn’t know it.”

The audience won’t see these workings, the complicated interior of the machine. Instead, as audiences do, they will respond to the result. “It’s going to be a happening,” jokes Yorke, and that is not the case, but a happening’s democratic hijack of artforms lies somewhere within.

The movement, another element, is easy to get your head around when you see it. It was built up over time, says Hoggett, after the words and the music; though, of course, it was important from the start. All the cast had to be able to act, sing and dance. Yorke’s daughter suggested Paul Hilton, who plays Claudius. “She saw him in Doctor Faustus,” says Yorke, “and by coincidence, he was in a video for the Smile, where he did an amazing performance as someone who taken too many drugs. He’s like a conduit.” Yorke also mentioned Samuel Blenkin after seeing him sing as Charles I in the TV series Mary & George: “He just really caught my attention.”

It can’t be easy, though, dancing to the skittish Hail to the Thief.

“No. You give the actors a time signature from the album, and it’s like, ‘You poor bastards. I’ll see you in a week,’” says Hoggett. “But this world is wonky. It’s on the slide, so even when it doesn’t quite sit, the actors slipping and sliding across the phrasing works.”

Yorke: “Yeah, when they asked me about the timings, I’d say, ‘Is it 4:4?’ And they’d look at me. It’s not 4:4.”

Modern audiences are literate about dance, says Hoggett. “People aren’t scared by movement. It doesn’t stop them understanding what a narrative is doing.” We watch and absorb physical movement more than we used to (TikTok is based on dancing, after all). Our online lives require us to soak up ideas and emotion in seconds, understand jokes, poignancies, clever references. Newer, younger audiences demand sophisticated, dense, swift dynamics. Radiohead crosses generations: teenagers are as much au fait with Jigsaw Falling Into Place as they are with Creep; they find their way to Motion Picture Soundtrack via a TikTok edit or just through their own complicated lives.

And if we see Hamlet as an album, it definitely has singles. “To be or not to be”, “What a piece of work is a man”, “Alas poor Yorick”, the seven soliquies. In the spirit of this production, these, too, have been deconstructed, made less obvious.

“Hamlet can bring out the worst of theatrical conceit and convention, so it’s been a pleasure to go, ‘This is a 400-year old, three-and-a-half-hour mansplain, let’s sort that out,’” says Hoggett, which makes me laugh. “Every 10 minutes, it’s an actor grandstanding, doing a big, famous monologue – ‘here it is, the bit you’ve been waiting for!’ – and the show seems to stop and regard how brilliant they are. We’ve made it very lean, Hamlet speaks quite a few soliloquies to another character.”

“Yeah, that way of highlighting soliloquies betrays a certain attitude towards the text,” says Yorke. “It makes it feel very holy.”

Radiohead’s work can be regarded as if it’s sacred, though Yorke takes no responsibility for that: “None of these things you can control, how people see what you do. You learn that as you go on.” Anyhow, he’s quite happy to reconsider Hail to the Thief – “I didn’t think twice” – because all of Radiohead felt there was “unfinished business” with the album. The recording process had been good, he says, but “I can’t really explain it, it just all turned to shit. Finishing it, mixing it, was really hard and not fun at all. So this has been a healthy process for me especially, but for the others [of Radiohead] as well, it’s been a way of claiming back what the original sentiment was. This whole thing was more open than just that one idea of Hail to the Thief.”

The one idea is the widely held notion that the album is a response to 9/11 and to George W Bush becoming US president in 2000 on a recount of votes in Florida. Yorke says that’s only partly true.

“Hail to the Thief: I just like the phrase because, up until that time, I’d fought with my own lack of self-belief. I felt that the whole thing was a lie, and someone was going to poke a hole through it and see us for who we really were. Jonny [Greenwood] begged me not to call it that. To some extent he was right, but I was like, ‘It’s all I’ve got, man.’”

Of course, Hamlet, even more than Hail to the Thief, has had many different themes and interpretations extracted from it and imposed from the outside. Typically, a deconstructed version might be called “a Hamlet for our times”; when I mention this, all three laugh. If there’s a sense of the moment we live in, it comes from the music, they say. The music provides the sound of the collapsing world around Hamlet and his family; the terrifying feel of structures disintegrating.

“There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark,” says Jones, “and right now the environment is … our information has been poisoned. Hamlet does speak to the current climate.” Even if you don’t watch the news, you can feel it, I say. Yes, says Yorke, but you don’t want the specificities in your work.

“Hamlet has reverberated through the ages because it was talking beyond the subjects at hand,” he says. “With Radiohead, when I would write lyrics, we’d talk about what should be thrown out, and most of the time it would be anything that felt dry. Dry, as in, to the point, reactive to something happening at that time. That would always get thrown out. It felt like sand in your mouth.

“As much as I absorb what’s going on, I still make a conscious decision that I don’t want my work to be reactive to that, because these fucking morons and idiots and sycophants and enablers will be gone soon, and we will want to forget about it. We will not want to be reminded. It’s a poison.”

“There’s always political and religious uncertainty in the world,” says Jones. “But Hamlet’s questions are always true. How do I position myself within a corrupt, chaotic world, society, family, government? Where do you find yourself? How do you tune your moral compass? In the middle of that, who are you?”

Hamlet Hail to the Thief is at Aviva Studios, Manchester from today to 18 May and the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford from 4-28 June

Rehearsal photographs by Manuel Harlan