There aren’t many Shakespearean productions, even at the RSC, that see touts walking up and down the Stratford-bound trains offering tickets for sale, but then “the Radiohead Hamlet”, as it has been known, is something a bit special. Ever since it was announced last year, Hamlet Hail To The Thief, as it is (somewhat unwieldily) entitled, was one of the most ambitious shows programmed this year. Co-directors and adapters Christine Jones and Steven Hoggett have worked with Radiohead’s Thom Yorke to take the band’s 2003 album Hail To The Thief and mash it up with a tightly edited version of Hamlet, which somehow combines deconstructed versions of every song on the album with the kind of cut-down text of the original play that would usually be performed in schools by touring companies. Oh, and for good measure, there’s a load of physical theatre, too.
If it sounds like a rather insane combination of mutually incompatible ingredients, then that’s the point, at least in part. Hamlet, of course, is the most famous theatrical meditation on madness and identity ever written, and so there is a certain shared DNA with many of Radiohead’s mournful and introspective songs. It would not seem wildly unlikely for a bedsit Hamlet to be singing “Creep” (“I don’t belong here”, etc) or for the Dane, faced with the army of troubles that beset him, to mournfully intone “Karma police, arrest this man”.
However, Jones, Hoggett and Yorke have not made their lives so easy. They’ve stripped down an album that Radiohead have semi-disassociated themselves from, allowing musical and lyrical motifs to drift in and out of the production, at times echoing the text and at other times deliberately working against it. So we hear the lines of the opening song “2 + 2 = 5”, “Are you such a dreamer/To put the world to rights” being sung (by the excellent on-stage performers Ed Begley and Megan Hill) but then the rest of the song is performed in different ways, at different points of the play.
Purists may shudder at the way the word “fuck” is thrown in to no particular effect
If you’re expecting Radiohead karaoke, forget it. The music sometimes exists as angsty underscore, at other times exploding into full violent passion; Ophelia, gripped with madness, sings “Sail To The Moon”, an appropriately doom-laden ballad, and as Claudius’s evil scheming reaches its zenith, the dynamic outro of the album’s highlight, “There There”, is played by the on-stage five-piece band with vigour and fury.
It is hard not to feel at times that there are two separate ideas running concurrently here, both of them excellent but not always entirely compatible. Although the title Hail to the Thief was a reference to George W Bush’s 2000 election victory — how quaint that particular liberal bugbear now seems! — it could equally be true of Claudius usurping old Hamlet’s throne by murdering him, so this works neatly. Yet many of the songs have little or nothing to do with the play, and so have been relegated to brief instrumental interludes. Sacrilegiously, I couldn’t help wondering what this Hamlet would have been like if it had prowled further around the Radiohead canon (yes, including “Creep”, which the band themselves have virtually disowned now), or, even more daringly, if Yorke et al had written original music and songs for the production.
Still, there is no point grouching about what Hamlet Hail To The Thief isn’t, and it is easy to commend it for what it does well. Jones and Hoggett, aided by their designers AMP (credited for “Scenography”), Will Duke and Jessica Hung Han Yun, have created an appropriately sturm und drang spectacle that makes intelligent, rather than grating, use of physical theatre and movement to compliment the massively cut-down text. The production follows Rupert Goold’s more traditional (although still spectacularly innovative and risk-taking) staging of a few months ago, and there is a similar sense of excitement and dynamism here. A particular highlight comes in the presentation of the Ghost not as an actor on stage but as a giant, shifting video projection, terrifyingly dominating both the cast and the auditorium alike.
Goold’s production introduced audiences to the excellent Luke Thallon, and his swashbucklingly assured Hamlet was probably the most dynamic calling card an actor has had since Ben Whishaw played the role at the Old Vic in 2004; he was duly cast as the main villain in the first series of Harry Potter television adaptations. If Samuel Blenkin’s angst-ridden, diminutive Hamlet can’t quite compete, that’s not his fault, more a reflection of the difficulty of trying to give an engaging, honest performance amidst the widescreen chaos around him. Yet individual actors still register, not least a vulnerable, relatively youthful Gertrude from Claudia Harrison, an impressively nasty Paul Hilton as Claudius and the excellent Ami Tredrea as Ophelia, who, in a neat touch, declaims the “To be or not to be” soliloquy herself before coming to a rather different conclusion to Hamlet earlier in the play.
This isn’t subtle or low-key stuff. (Purists may shudder at the way the word “fuck” is casually thrown in a few times, to no particular effect.) I can’t help wondering whether there is a still greater version of it that might find its happiest berth in London and/or New York, and establish itself as the classic that it comes so near to being. But until then, this is theatre as rock concert, and every bit as giddily exhilarating as that might imply. The tout sold his tickets; I bet his buyers were glad they bought them.
Hamlet Hail To The Thief is at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon until 28 June
