Time Out doesn’t as a rule review shows that aren’t in London. But I am so aggressively smack bang in the centre of the Venn diagram of ‘people who like Shakespeare’s 1599 play Hamlet’ and ‘people who like Radiohead’s 2003 album Hail to the Thief’ that when the opportunity to attend the Manchester opening night of the stage mash-up Hamlet Hail to the Thief came up I felt obliged to go. When I asked my editor’s permission he simply grunted bestially, a clear yes.
To bring you up to speed, the RSC/Factory International co-production was devised by a creative team headed by co-directors Christine Jones and Steven Hoggett and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke. Hamlet Hail to the Thief is essentially a truncated and rearranged version of Hamlet that makes heavy use of the music – often heavily reworked – of Radiohead’s sixth album, as played by a live band (not Radiohead).
Why? I don’t really know!
Radiohead’s music is paranoid and existential and in that sense band and play are a solid match. But it never seems obvious why this album, beyond a programme note that states Jones had the idea when she saw the band on the Hail to the Thief tour. I believe every song from the record is included in some form or other, but that just makes it more perplexing: the likes of ‘A Punch Up At A Wedding’, ‘Myxomatosis’ and ‘A Wolf at the Door’ are reduced to (quite pleasant) instrumental riffs that suggest it was deemed conceptually important to cram every track in. But was it, really?
What it’s definitely not is Hail to the Thief! The Hamlet Musical: most of the songs aren’t performed by the cast, but rather singers Ed Begley and Megan Hill, and none of the tracks get complete, uncut run throughs – even the album’s majestic top five hit ‘There There’ is played largely instrumentally and divided into two sections, with the intro, verse and chorus deployed early on and the frenzied outro spun off and used for the scene in which Samuel Blenkin’s dishevelled Hamlet contemplates murdering Paul Hilton’s at-prayer Claudius. (I suspect the record’s comparative obscurity is a factor in choosing it - maybe Hamlet OK Computer would be in danger of inducing mass singalongs and audiences might be more annoyed if some of the songs were breezed through).
Flipping things around, it’s not entirely obvious what Hamlet is gaining from any of this: I’m not talking about the songs here, but being performed in a truncated version embellished with some Hoggettian choreographic sequences – it’s a greatly shortened take on a play that realistically needs another hour (if not two) to really cook.
But but but – if you don’t get bogged down in asking ‘why?’ and just accept that ‘it is’ then Hamlet Hail to the Thief is pretty cool. Some of the songs or song fragments undoubtedly work very well: virtually the only line of ‘There There’ to be saved is the deeply poignant chorus ‘just because you feel it, doesn’t mean it’s there’, which does feel like a pithy encapsulation of the play’s entire theme; the heady ‘Where You End And I Begin’ gives some extra heft to the romance between Blenkin‘s Hamlet and Ami Tredrea’s Ophelia; ‘Sail to the Moon’ and ‘Scatterbrain’ are actually successfully integrated as musical-style numbers sung by end-of-their-tethers Ophelia and Hamlet respectively; that bit at the end of ‘Sit Down Stand Up’ where Yorke sings ‘the raindrops, the raindrops’ over furious glitchcore is just awesome and deftly spun off as the soundtrack to Hamlet and Laertes’s climatic duel.
The songs are smartly used to make the protagonist’s relationship with Ophelia more substantial, but I was never clear why he turns on her. I was fairly uncertain as to whether Hamlet was even trying to take revenge on his stepfather Claudius: his accidental stabbing of Tom Peters’s strait-laced Polonius is made to look like a genuine total mishap. There is simply no time in this production to establish whether Hamlet really is mad and what precisely his plans are after encountering his father’s ghost.
Still, there’s some very cool stuff thrown up by the process. ‘To be or not to be’ isn’t delivered as a soliloquy but as a cracked monologue by Hamlet as he menacingly advances on a disconcerted Ophelia; later she reprises the existential rumination as her own mind starts to fray. There is, on the whole, an agreeably nightmarish quality to the whole thing: on an inky stage where everyone wears black and with minimum props beyond a scattering of amps, it almost feels like the music becomes the bleak scenery, not just the songs proper but the ever present snarls of feedback and icy drones.
Ultimately this is a quixotic endeavour – it is almost inconceivable that an old Radiohead album might offer some deeper key to unlocking Hamlet than, say, a really good three-and-a-half hour production of Hamlet. As much as anything else, the famously lengthy play and relatively short album are simply out of joint with each other.
And yet as a weird idea that was never going to ‘work’, I enjoyed it, not just because I like the songs and I like the play, but because in the broken remnants of Shakespeare and Radiohead that it serves up, it’s possible to see an imperfect but compelling new thing. Hamlet Hail to the Thief doesn’t entirely make sense, but it is haunting, a journey into human darkness that’s more visceral than articulated.
★★★
Hamlet Hail to the Thief is at Factory International until May 18. It transfers to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon Jun 4-28.