Hamlet Hail to the Thief, a new stage production co-created by Thom Yorke, Christine Jones, and Steven Hoggett, has opened at the Barbican, drawing fans of both Shakespeare and Radiohead. The show presents a frenetic, dystopian interpretation of Shakespeare's tragedy, with the band's 2003 album woven into the narrative, movement, and overall experience.
The actor playing Hamlet told The Standard that "it shouldn't work", and Radiohead's frontman has described the piece as "sacrilege" to Shakespeare's art. The Standard gained an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the set and spoke with co-director Christine Jones and Samuel Blenkin, who plays the protagonist, about how the idea developed over more than 20 years.
A long-gestating concept
The concept originated in 2003, when Christine Jones saw Radiohead perform the then-new Hail To the Thief album live while she was simultaneously working on a production of Hamlet. "I saw a Hail To the Thief concert in 2003. It was the first time I'd seen Radiohead live and it changed my DNA, it blew me away. The design, the music, the songs, their performances, it was a religious experience," she said.
"I think I became infected by the album, but then coincidentally in the same year, I was designing a production of Hamlet and I often listen to music when I'm working. So I had the album on, my ears pricked up and I said, 'wait a minute, what's happening?'" She described an "uncanny connection between the two", calling it a "big bang moment". It took another decade or so to ask Thom Yorke if he was interested in exploring the idea, and once he expressed interest, "that felt like permission".
For Radiohead fans, this is the first chance to see any form of the band's art live since their European tour at the end of last year, or since The Smile, Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood's side project, released Wall Of Eyes in 2024. Yorke previously composed music for the 2015 Broadway production of Harold Pinter's Old Times, but this production marks his most involved stage work.
Yorke's hands-on collaboration
Christine Jones said Yorke was "embroiled in every step of the production. He was in our rehearsals, our tech rehearsals, he worked on the music with Justin Levine [arranger] and Tom Brady [musical director] and was an incredible collaborator throughout the whole process."
"He was determined that there not be needle-drop songs, that it was always being reimagined and pulled apart. Sometimes he took a piece of music that might be played on a piano and have it played on guitar, or have it played on a synth. So he was experimenting throughout the whole process."
The pairing of Hamlet's sombre tale with Radiohead's melancholic, ethereal sound has drawn comparisons between the album's lyrics and Shakespeare's writing. "What we discovered quickly is there are [Hail To the Thief] lyrics which feel like they could have been written by Shakespeare, whether it's talking about the 'witching hour' or the 'time being out of joints' and having to 'set the world to right'," Jones said. "There are these echoes that are embedded. The two pieces aren't written to be connected, but clearly have all of these resonances. We often say that the play is haunted by the album and the album is haunted by the play."
Distilling the script and designing the set
Samuel Blenkin, a Radiohead fan, recalled his first encounter with Thom Yorke during rehearsals. "I remember coming in to do a little bit of singing and I walked into the studio and Thom was there. So I'm there singing one of his songs and he's playing the guitar. You don't forget those moments. You just bank them." He added, "I tried not to come across as too much of a mad, maniacal, nerdy fan and just let it happen. I feel very grateful to be here collaborating with people who I hold as my morning stars."
The production runs 1 hour 50 minutes, considerably shorter than Shakespeare's Hamlet, which typically takes around four hours. During a Christmas quarantine in the COVID-19 pandemic, Jones described the writing process as taking an "internal scalpel" to the script. "I call it creating a spine line. I thought, 'what if I started at the beginning of the album and go in order?' Like the way some people put on Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon with The Wizard of Oz."
The set features embedded recording booths holding a live band on stage behind the actors, with large speakers looming over the audience. Jones explained that the design drew inspiration from prisons and execution chambers, referencing Hamlet's line about Denmark being a "prison", as well as NASA's Reverberant Acoustic Test Facilities, a space created to test how sound affects both humans and spacecraft.
Hamlet Hail to the Thief is on at the Barbican Centre until 23 January 2027.
