In recent months, there's been a lot of speculation that Radiohead, now dormant, could soon launch their first tour since 2018. Before that happens, though, Thom Yorke has some other business at hand. Next month, he'll release Tall Tales, the album that he made with producer Mark Pritchard. Yorke is also one of the key creative forces on Hamlet Hail To The Thief, a new production that interweaves the Shakespeare tragedy Hamlet with the music from Radiohead's 2003 album Hail To The Thief.
Hamlet Hail To The Thief, which was announced last year, opened in previews on Sunday night. It's running at Manchester's Aviva Studios until May 18, and it'll move to Stratford's Royal Shakespeare Theatre in June. There haven't been any professional reviews of the show yet, but one fan went on Instagram to say that it exceeded expectations: "Every song and every scene aligned so perfectly that it truly felt like everything in its right place." You see what they did there. They continue: "What surprised me most was how the production resisted retelling the plot in a traditional way. Instead, everything unfolded wordlessly, in the dynamic interplay between rock and classic literature, between the audience and the stage."
Thom Yorke reportedly worked in close collaboration with directors Christine Jones and Steven Hoggett to adapt Hail To The Thief to make it fit with Hamlet, and the three of them spoke to The Observer together while the show was in rehearsals. The idea for the show comes from Jones, who found herself listening to Hail To The Thief while working on a different Hamlet production in the mid-'00s, noticing where the two pieces of work resonated with one another. In the piece, Yorke says:
I can confirm that Hamlet was not in our minds when we made the record... I don’t not subscribe to the synchronicity thing. You know, the one about The Wizard Of Oz and Dark Side Of The Moon... [that] you watch a movie, turn the sound down, put on another soundtrack and something is revealed... But obviously, my initial reaction was, this is Hamlet, therefore it’s sacrosanct, it’s untouchable. You can’t. But the idea didn’t go away. It planted a little seed in my head.
Yorke says that he didn't want complete-song needledrops in the play but that he liked the idea of multiple levels of performance happening at once: "So, a band playing, but rather than an orchestra in a pit, actually playing. Not playing as a covers band." According to Yorke, an early attempt at the joint adaptation was "a disaster," with "this endless stream of people I didn’t know were involved, coming in at exactly the wrong moment." But then the three people behind the production worked on their different parts separately, with Yorke coming up with the idea for the musicians to all be in "an enclosed booth... like that film with Toby Jones -- Berberian Sound Studio." Yorke also helped suggest some of the actors for the production, and the actors and choreographers had to get acclimated to the music's commplicated time signatures.
Hamlet is Shakespeare's longest play, and Hail To The Thief is Radiohead's longest LP if you count the second disc of In Rainbows as a separate record, but Hoggett says that they've "made it very lean," highlighting certain soliloquies as if they're singles from an album. Yorke says that the approach "makes it feel very holy." Yorke is happy to have a chance to revisit Hail To The Thief because he thinks there's "unfinished business" with the LP: "I can’t really explain it, it just all turned to shit. Finishing it, mixing it, was really hard and not fun at all. So this has been a healthy process for me especially, but for the others [of Radiohead] as well, it’s been a way of claiming back what the original sentiment was. This whole thing was more open than just that one idea of Hail To The Thief."
You can read the full Observer piece here. Hamlet Hail To The Thief is running at Aviva Studios until 5/18, and it's running at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre 6/4-28.
