Hamlet Hail to the Thief London audiences will finally get their turn: the Radiohead-scored Shakespeare adaptation arrives at the Barbican Theatre on 31 October, running through 23 January.
The production melds Shakespeare’s text with Radiohead’s 2003 album Hail to the Thief, directed and adapted by Christine Jones and Steven Hoggett, with Thom Yorke reworking and orchestrating the album’s songs for a cast of 20 musicians and actors. Samuel Blenkin returns as Hamlet, with Ami Tredrea reprising her role as Ophelia.
Sold-Out Runs Before the Hamlet Hail to the Thief London Bow
This is not a production feeling its way in the dark. It made its world debut in Manchester last year, and Variety reports the show played to sold-out houses at the Royal Shakespeare Company and at Aviva Studios, home of Factory International. That track record of full rooms at two very different venues, one a cathedral of classical theatre, the other Manchester’s flagship arts and culture complex, says something about the breadth of audience this thing has managed to pull in. It was never going to be purely a Radiohead crowd or purely a rep-theatre crowd. It seems to be both.
Yorke himself sounds genuinely disarmed by the whole thing. ‘I’m into finally bringing Hamlet Hail to the Thief to London, and to the Barbican of all places!’ he wrote in a press release. ‘It is fascinating and very strange to me how this came to life and how it has worked. When it revealed itself to us over time I was shocked, having never had this kind of experience before. I am happy for it to be seen by a wider audience in such an intense space.’
That last phrase (‘such an intense space’) is doing a lot of work. The Barbican is a brutalist labyrinth of a building, and its main theatre has a scale and acoustic presence that tends to either swallow a production whole or amplify it into something overwhelming. For a show built around paranoia, grief, and Radiohead’s most overtly political record, the fit sounds deliberate.
What the Production Actually Does With the Material
BroadwayWorld describes the show as ‘a fast-paced distillation of the play’ in which ‘Shakespeare’s words and Radiohead’s songs illuminate one another in thrilling new ways that fuse theatre, music and movement.’ That framing matters. This is not a concept album dropped into a dramatic setting as a novelty, and it is not a Shakespeare production that has licensed a few tracks for atmosphere. The suggestion, from everyone who has seen it, is that the two bodies of work are genuinely in conversation.
Hail to the Thief was Radiohead’s seventh studio album and arrived charged with a specific cultural anxiety: post-9/11, pre-Iraq War, a moment when paranoia felt less like a personal affliction and more like a reasonable response to the news cycle. Hamlet has always been a play about exactly that quality of mind, the person who cannot stop reading the world for hidden threat, who cannot trust the surface of things. The alignment, on paper, sounds almost too convenient. Yet Pitchfork contributor Daniel Dylan Wray, reviewing the production, found it earned: ‘This project really doesn’t have any right to work, or make quite as much sense as it does. But it is an absorbing, heart-racing, and thrilling production that gracefully utilizes this music to co-exist within powerful dramatic depictions of grief, fear, madness, and death.’
The fact that Jones and Hoggett have held the same cast through Manchester, Stratford-upon-Avon, and now London gives the show a sense of accumulation. Blenkin and Tredrea have been living with these roles across sold-out runs at two major venues. By the time the Barbican run opens on 31 October, the production will carry that collective weight into one of London’s most demanding spaces.
Hamlet Hail to the Thief runs at the Barbican Theatre from 31 October through 23 January.
