Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke has teamed with Tony and Olivier Award-winning directors Steven Hoggett and Christine Jones to create a contemporary adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet scored by Radiohead’s 2003 album Hail to the Thief.
Titled Hamlet Hail To The Thief, the project will run at Aviva Studios in Manchester from 27 April – 18 May 2025 before transferring to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, where it will run from June 4 – 28, 2025.
Described as a “fast-paced distillation” of the play, producers have said Shakespeare’s words and Radiohead’s album “illuminate one another” as Radiohead’s music becomes a central part of the play’s narrative. The play is said to have been “personally reworked by Yorke.” The music will be performed live onstage by a cast of 20 musicians and actors.
“This is an interesting and intimidating challenge,” Yorke said of the production. “Adapting the original music of Hail To The Thief for live performance with the actors on stage to tell this story that is forever being told, using its familiarity and sounds, pulling them into and out of context, seeing what chimes with the underlying grief and paranoia of Hamlet, using the music as a ‘presence’ in the room, watching how it collides with the action and the text. Ghosting one against the other.”
Hail to the Thief is Radiohead’s sixth studio album. Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey, Joint Artistic Directors at the Royal Shakespeare Company described the adaptation as a “momentous project.”
“To combine the totemic talents of William Shakespeare, with Radiohead and Thom Yorke, into a thrilling experiential piece of theatre, guided by the genius of Steven Hoggett and Christine Jones, is a dream. It’s an event that embodies a core strand of our work, which is to be a meeting place for the work of our in-house playwright with the most exciting artists of our time, nationally and internationally,” the pair said.
Hamlet Hail To The Thief will be directed by Hoggett and Jones.
Hoggett is a founder member of Frantic Assembly, whose credits as a choreographer include The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime and Black Watch, for which he won an Olivier award. Jones is the creator and Artistic Director of Theater For One, and director of the New York immersive nightclub experience, Queen of the Night. Their projects together as choreographer and designer include Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, American Idiot, and Let the Right One In. She’s won two Tony awards. Jones previously worked with Radiohead on the digital art exhibition KID AMNESIA.