Thom Yorke is to rework Radiohead’s album Hail to the Thief for a new stage production of Hamlet, opening next spring in Manchester.
Yorke said that the concept for the show presented him with “an interesting and intimidating challenge” to see how the music “collides with the action and the text” of Shakespeare’s tragedy. He added that the endeavour would uncover how much of his band’s album, which features the tracks There There and Go to Sleep, “chimes with the underlying grief and paranoia” of the play.
Performed by a cast of musicians and actors, Hamlet Hail to the Thief will run at Aviva Studios, Manchester, from 27 April to 18 May. It will then be staged at the Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 4-28 June.
Christine Jones, who will co-direct the production with Steven Hoggett, said Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief tour “changed my DNA” and that many of their songs “speak to the themes of the play”. Her long-held dream of combining the two works intrigued Yorke. “We’ve found that the play haunts the album, and the album haunts the play,” said Jones.
Hail to the Thief, which was released in the summer of 2003, was not met with universal praise. In a three star review for the Guardian, critic Alexis Petridis wrote: “Hail to the Thief’s big drawback has less to do with its similarity to its predecessor than the sense that Radiohead’s famed gloominess is becoming self-parodic.” However, in a reappraisal six years later, Pitchfork’s Joe Tangari suggested: “Time and persistence have been kind to it … [it’s proof] that there can be life for a band after its landmark statement, and that life sounds pretty damn good.”
The record’s title was a spin on the anthem for the US president (Hail to the Chief), which Yorke had heard in reference to George W Bush’s disputed victory in Florida in the 2000 election. Jones said that Shakespeare and Radiohead were both reflecting on “the internal disquiet and rage that result from despair – in particular despair arising from scrutiny of dominant power structures – whether within governments, communities or families. The text and music probe us relentlessly to question what we are made of, and how to discern right from wrong.”
It is not the first time that the worlds of the Stratford-upon-Avon playwright and the Oxfordshire-formed band have combined. In 2023, a concert performance in Los Angeles called Perchance to Dream presented a cyberpunk take on Hamlet using Radiohead’s music. Yorke’s band, formed in 1985, provided a song for Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film version of Romeo and Juliet starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes. Exit Music (for a Film) was used, as the title suggests, over its end credits. The movie also featured their song Talk Show Host.
Aviva Studios – home to the organisation Factory International – has presented some eye-catching multidisciplinary productions in its £242m building on the site of the former Granada television studios. It was launched in October last year with director Danny Boyle’s Free Your Mind, a dance version of The Matrix. In winter, Super Furry Animals’ Gruff Rhys provided the music for an adaptation of Oliver Jeffers’ Lost and Found.
John McGrath, artistic director and chief executive of Factory International, said: “Hamlet Hail to the Thief is exactly the kind of inventive and ambitious collaboration that Aviva Studios was built for – speaking to the heart of our vision to be a space for artists to imagine new possibilities.”
Hoggett, who previously worked with Jones on Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (he as movement director, she as set designer), suggested that the production would make an arresting introduction for those unfamiliar with the Bard’s work. “Anyone seeing their first ever Shakespeare will find a variety of ‘ways in’ to enjoy and appreciate what a spectacular play this is,” he said.
Casting for Hamlet Hail to the Thief is yet to be announced. Tickets go on sale on 2 October.