Thom Yorke reworks Hail to the Thief as the music for a Hamlet

Factory International and the Royal Shakespeare Company have announced Hamlet Hail to the Thief, a staging of Shakespeare's play with Thom Yorke's reworking of Hail to the Thief as its music. Yorke has rearranged and orchestrated the album's songs, and a company of 20 actors and musicians will play them live against the text. It opens at Aviva Studios in Manchester, Factory International's home, next April, and moves to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in June.

Tickets go on general sale on Wednesday 2 October at 10am, a day after a presale for subscribers to W.A.S.T.E., the band's mailing list and shop.

Hamlet Hail to the Thief

The idea is Christine Jones's. The first Radiohead concert I ever saw was the Hail to the Thief tour in 2003. It changed my DNA.¹ Not long afterwards she read Hamlet with the album on and kept noticing how many of its songs spoke to the play. Years later she told Yorke, and he was intrigued.

Jones and Steven Hoggett adapted the play and direct it together; on Harry Potter and the Cursed Child she designed the set while he directed the movement. Justin Levine did the arrangements. Their Elsinore is a surveillance state, with paranoia and corruption closing in on Hamlet and Ophelia. Yorke describes his part as using the music as a ‘presence’ in the room, watching how it collides with the action and the text. Ghosting one against the other.¹

Radiohead wrote “Exit Music (for a Film)” for Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet in 1996, and it plays over the film's end credits; the film used “Talk Show Host” too. The new production's artwork lays lines from Hamlet over Stanley Donwood's cover for Hail to the Thief. We've found that the play haunts the album, and the album haunts the play.⁵