7 May 2025
Aviva Studios Manchester
*****
A Unique Theatrical Experience Melds the Music of Radiohead with Shakespeare’s Hamlet
In late 2002/early 2003, Thom Yorke, Radiohead’s main singer and songwriter (and a member of The Smile) wrote the lyrics for the band’s sixth studio album, Hail to the Thief. Four hundred years earlier, Shakespeare was writing Hamlet. Yorke wasn’t thinking of Hamlet when he wrote the lyrics, any more than Shakespeare was thinking of Radiohead when he wrote his play. But later in 2003, director and designer Christine Jones went to see Radiohead at Madison Square Garden, and while working on a production of Hamlet, she began to see striking links between the album and the play,
‘I was haunted by the idea of them being in dialogue with each other… Both look at the complexity of what it is to be human, to delude yourself and to be deluded by the government. To find your moral compass within the world.’
Over twenty years later, Jones’ vision came to fruition at Factory International’s Aviva Studios in Manchester. On Radio 4’s Front Row, she described it as ‘part play, part concert.’ Jones stripped out much of Hamlet’s text, and together with co-creator and co-director Steven Hoggett and choreographer Jess Williams, created a stunning new hybrid of live theatre and dance with the music of Radiohead. To be clear, the members of the band aren’t involved in the live production, but Yorke was heavily involved in slicing up and repurposing Radiohead’s music to be performed by a superb live band led by Tom Brady, with stunning vocals by Ed Begley and Megan Hill.
The result is an intensely visceral, profoundly moving experience, so compelling that it seems far shorter than the two hours (without an interval) it occupies in the real world. The production creates its own enclosed world outside time, a world of paranoia, violence, and occasional dark humour. All the characters wear black suits, suggesting moral ambiguity and interchangeability (there are no heroes here) except Ophelia, dressed in white after her death. The band are enclosed behind glass in sound booths. The two singers appear in doorways on a platform above, like ghostly apparitions. The ghost of Hamlet’s father (Paul Hilton, who also plays Claudius) appears as a terrifying projection on the set. The dancing is often jittery, unsettling and jerky, reflecting the line from the play, ‘the time is out of joint.’ Four Fender amplifiers are scattered around the stage, which help create the feel of a rock concert and also serve as pedestals for the characters to stand on. The live band’s sound is pristine, and the music is expertly played.
Some of the lyrics from the album have remarkable resonances with Shakespeare’s text, and the production expertly brings out the parallels. The opening song, 2 +2 = 5, describes a dystopian world of lies and deceit, ‘ January has April showers.. It’s the devil’s way now.’ The Gloaming describes how
“It is now the witching hour
Murderers, you’re murderers“
Compared with Hamlet
“’Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out“
As Hamlet stands looking down on Claudius, who is attempting to pray, the stripped-back music and lighting beautifully evoke the atmosphere of a church.
Before she commits suicide, Ophelia sings Sail to the Moon, one of the most moving and delicate songs on the album. It’s a very poignant moment; the poignancy is increased by the addition of bitter words from the play at the end of the song, ‘[he] promised me to wed.’
Hamlet (Samuel Blenkin), singing in a gorgeous falsetto, performs Scatterbrain, the title of which reflects his scattered state of mind. He describes how ‘any fool can easy [sic] pick a hole, I only wish I could fall in’, after Ophelia has committed suicide by falling into a hole that then becomes her grave.
We Suck Young Blood chimes with Hamlet’s line, ‘My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth.’ Other lines from the song describe his state of mind,
“Are you fracturing
Are you torn at the seams?“
But despite these seamless links between the album and the play – and there are no doubt others – the production doesn’t invite us to identify specific songs or lyrical and literary similarities. Instead, it successfully creates a hauntingly seamless whole, where music and words speak to and illuminate each other. Music is often used as underscore to heighten emotion. The fight scene near the end is accompanied by Sit Down, Stand Up with its emotive lyrics, ‘walk into the jaws of hell’, which could describe the play’s setting, but the music illustrates the scene. It’s incredibly powerful, with an added synth line, extra percussion and heavy metal guitars. And the final, tragic scene is illuminated by an instrumental version of A Wolf at the Door, with soaring, wordless vocals, moving and elegiac, leaving us emotionally drained at the end.
‘While Hamlet languishes in his grief and debates what action to take, Ophelia does not hesitate – she is resolutely a woman of action.’
Ayanna Thompson
The fracturing of the text is partly engineered to cast the character of Ophelia (Ami Tredrea) in a new light. In other productions, she has sometimes felt like a mere appendage to Hamlet’s tortured ego, but she has true agency here. Ayanna Thompson writes, ‘While Hamlet languishes in his grief and debates what action to take, Ophelia does not hesitate – she is resolutely a woman of action… even if the actions end in self-harm.’ Her relationship with Hamlet is bitter on both sides. But Jones does add a moment of joy as they dance together like two carefree teenagers. She says, ‘I wanted to let them be lovers for a bit.’
Hamlet, essentially a man of inaction, is viewed by Jones as a young man finding his way, at the end of adolescence, disillusioned with the adult world’s failure to live up to his expectations. Blenkin accurately illustrates the combination of the articulate, cynical and vulnerable. He sometimes delivers his lines with a little stammer as if still troubled by teenage shyness. He is utterly compelling in the way he inhabits the role; he is Hamlet.
As Hamlet’s stepfather, Claudius, Paul Hilton is the perfect mix of the urbane and the evil; in a contemporary context, he could be the polished but corrupt CEO of a major company, proving that, in Hamlet’s words, ‘one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.’ In one scene, his corrupt cynicism is revealed through his dancing.
Claudia Harrison warmly portrays Claudius’ new wife, Gertrude; the bedroom scene between her and Hamlet is genuinely moving, shredding our heartstrings. Alby Baldwin plays Horatio as a resolute and grounded foil to the wayward Hamlet, Brandon Grace is a determined Laertes, and Tom Peters a suitably tedious Polonius.
Sources
Kate Wyver, ‘Everything Started to Become Possible’ (Factory International Official Programme)
Ayanna Thompson, ‘A Woman of Action’ (ibid.)
Front Row Hamlet Radiohead mashup (BBC Radio 4, Tuesday 6 May)
‘Hamlet Hail to the Thief’ is a co-production between the Royal Shakespeare Company and Factory International, running at Aviva Studios Home of Factory International, Manchester until 18 May before transferring to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford Upon Avon from 4 June to 28 June.
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