Hamlet Hail to the Thief, an acclaimed stage production fusing Shakespeare’s tragedy with Radiohead’s sixth album, is to open at the Barbican theatre in London this autumn.
The show had its world premiere at Aviva Studios in Manchester last year and then ran at the Royal Shakespeare theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. It is a co-production between Factory International and the Royal Shakespeare Company and was co-created by Radiohead frontman, Thom Yorke, and the directors Steven Hoggett and Christine Jones. Yorke reworked the 2003 album, which is performed live on stage by a cast of musicians and actors, the lyrics reinforcing themes of grief, despair and paranoia in the play.
Samuel Blenkin will return in the role of Hamlet. In his four-star review, the Guardian’s Mark Fisher praised Blenkin’s “startling” performance as “a voice of a generation exasperated by the failures of his superiors” who has “as much to rail against the world about as Yorke and his band did in the aftermath of September 11 and the ascendancy of George W Bush”. The record’s title was a spin on the US president’s anthem (Hail to the Chief), which Yorke had heard in reference to Bush’s disputed victory in Florida in the 2000 election.
The show will run from 31 October to 23 January. Yorke said: “I’m finally bringing Hamlet Hail to the Thief to London, and to the Barbican of all places! It is fascinating and very strange to me how this came to life and how it has worked. When it revealed itself to us over time I was shocked, having never had this kind of experience before. I am happy for it to be seen by a wider audience in such an intense space.” Jones said: “Both the play and the album continue to speak urgently to the convulsed world we find ourselves in.” Hoggett said that the Barbican is a place where “the boundaries [are] blown apart as to what theatre might be”.
Among the actors returning from the original production are Paul Hilton as Claudius, Claudia Harrison as Gertrude and Ami Tredrea as Ophelia who, in this version, also asks the question “to be or not to be”.
In the process of reworking Hail to the Thief for the stage production, Yorke listened to archive live recordings of its songs. “I was shocked by the kind of energy behind the way we played,” he said. Newly mixed versions of those live recordings, from 2003 to 2009, were released as a surprise Radiohead album last summer.
