Hamlet Hail to the Thief will premiere in April next year in Manchester.
Thom Yorke is reworking Radiohead’s 2003 album Hail to the Thief for a new theatre production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which will debut at Manchester’s Aviva Studios from 27 April-18 May 2025. The show will then transfer to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon from 4-18 June.
Performed by a cast of around 20 musicians and actors, Hamlet Hail to the Thief will merge music, movement and theatre, using Yorke’s orchestrations to illuminate the themes of the play.
Christine Jones, who is co-directing the show with Steven Hoggett, first noticed this overlap of dystopian themes in Hamlet and Hail to the Thief after seeing the album performed live in 2003.
“It changed my DNA,” she said of the band’s performance. “Not long after, I was reading Hamlet and listening to the album. Paying attention to the lyrics, I became aware of how many songs from Hail to the Thief speak to the themes of the play. There are uncanny reverberances between the text and the album.
“For years I’ve wanted to see the play and album collide in a piece of theatre; eventually I shared the idea with Thom, who was intrigued.”
“This is an interesting and intimidating challenge,” Yorke commented. “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.”
Featuring singles There, There, Go to Sleep and 2 + 2 = 5, Hail to the Thief is Radiohead’s sixth studio album. Recorded in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, it explores a period of paranoia and anxiety in response to the subsequent ‘war on terror’.
Tickets for Hamlet Hail to the Thief are set to go on sale at 10am on 2 October 2024 at factoryinternational.org and rsc.org.uk
