Hamlet Hail to the Thief London finally has a home: the production that fused Shakespeare’s most performed tragedy with Radiohead’s politically charged 2003 album will open at the Barbican on 31 October and run through 23 January.
The show made its world debut in Manchester last year, going on to play sold-out houses at the Royal Shakespeare Company and Aviva Studios, home of Factory International, according to Variety. The London run marks its biggest stage yet, and from the sounds of things, the momentum has not cooled.
The Cast and Creative Team Behind Hamlet Hail to the Thief
Christine Jones and Steven Hoggett direct and adapt the production, with Thom Yorke reworking and orchestrating Hail to the Thief songs across a company of 20 musicians and actors. Samuel Blenkin reprises the title role, with Ami Tredrea returning as Ophelia. Blenkin, who previously appeared in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child according to Playbill, brings Hamlet’s spiralling interiority to a piece that leans heavily on that very quality.
Joining them for the London run, The Guardian reports that Paul Hilton plays Claudius and Claudia Harrison plays Gertrude. Those are roles at the dark centre of the play’s power struggle, and casting of that weight signals how seriously this production is pitching itself.
Yorke, for his part, is barely concealing his excitement. ‘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.’
Why the Critics Are Already Paying Attention
The sell-out runs at the RSC and Aviva Studios were not the result of curiosity alone. The Guardian’s Mark Fisher awarded the production four stars, and Pitchfork contributor Daniel Dylan Wray gave it a full concert review after its earlier run, writing that ‘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.’
Wray’s observation gets at something real. Hail to the Thief, released in 2003, arrived thick with post-9/11 anxiety, surveillance dread, and a creeping sense that the world’s institutions had turned hostile. Hamlet’s court in Elsinore is, if nothing else, a study in exactly those things: paranoia dressed up in protocol, grief weaponised as political instability. The music and the text are not just compatible, they are, apparently, uncomfortably well matched.
That the production landed at sold-out venues before even reaching London says something about appetite. Theatre audiences in Manchester and Stratford-upon-Avon do not typically fill rooms out of novelty alone. The combination of Yorke’s authorial investment, Jones and Hoggett’s staging, and a cast that now includes Hilton and Harrison alongside returning leads Blenkin and Tredrea makes the Hamlet Hail to the Thief London premiere at the Barbican one of the more anticipated theatrical events of the season.
The Barbican run opens 31 October and plays through 23 January.
