Hamlet Hail to the Thief London has a date: the Radiohead-scored Shakespeare adaptation lands at the Barbican from 31 October through 23 January, giving the capital its first look at a production that has already sold out two major venues on the road to this point.
From Manchester to the Barbican: the road to Hamlet Hail to the Thief London
The production made its world debut in Manchester last year, before completing a further run at the Royal Shakespeare Company. According to Variety, both that RSC engagement and an earlier run at Aviva Studios, home of Factory International, played to sold-out houses. The Barbican booking, then, arrives on the back of genuine, demonstrable demand rather than hype alone.
The show sets Shakespeare’s Hamlet against Radiohead’s 2003 album Hail to the Thief, with Thom Yorke reworking and orchestrating the music alongside a cast of 20 musicians and actors. Christine Jones and Steven Hoggett direct and adapt. It is the kind of concept that sounds precarious on paper but has, by most accounts, confounded expectations in the room.
The cast returning to and joining the production
Samuel Blenkin reprises the title role, with Ami Tredrea returning as Ophelia. The Guardian reports that Paul Hilton plays Claudius and Claudia Harrison plays Gertrude, filling out the central court around Blenkin’s prince.
That is a substantial ensemble at the heart of it, and the combination of a large band, a full acting company and the Barbican’s scale should give the production room it has not always had. Yorke, for one, sounds pleased about the venue specifically.
Yorke on the Barbican and what the show means to him
‘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.’
There is something worth paying attention to in that phrasing: Yorke describing the show as something that ‘revealed itself’ rather than something he built to a blueprint. For a project that layers a politically charged rock record over one of the most over-produced plays in the English language, that sense of discovery, of the thing finding its own logic, matters. It goes some way to explaining why the response has been less ‘interesting experiment’ and more ‘actually works’.
What the critics made of it on the road
Pitchfork contributor Daniel Dylan Wray covered the production on its earlier run and was direct about the improbability of it all. ‘This project really doesn’t have any right to work, or make quite as much sense as it does,’ he wrote. ‘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 thematic fit is not incidental. Hail to the Thief was recorded and released at the height of post-9/11 anxiety and the build-up to the Iraq War, saturated in paranoia and political dread. Hamlet, of course, is a play that runs on precisely those frequencies: surveillance, betrayal, a state rotting from the inside. Wray’s point is that the dovetailing of those two bodies of work is less a clever conceit than a structural truth the production found by actually putting them together.
Hamlet Hail to the Thief plays the Barbican from 31 October. Tickets are available now.
