Ophelia sings “Sail to the Moon” as Hamlet Hail to the Thief meets the critics

The critics saw Hamlet Hail to the Thief at Aviva Studios in Manchester on Wednesday 7 May, its press night, ten days after the first preview. In this Hamlet it is Ophelia (Ami Tredrea) who speaks “To be or not to be”, which Nick Curtis of The Standard thinks right, since she is the one who chooses to die. On the way to that death she sings a few lines of “Sail to the Moon”, and Daniel Dylan Wray of Pitchfork picks it as the moment where song and scene fit best.

No song is played whole. Most of Hail to the Thief comes as wordless phrases and repeated patterns of notes, and only “2 + 2 = 5”, “Go to Sleep” and “There There” get the full band, again and again. “There There” crashes in just after Hamlet first sees his father's ghost, and “Go to Sleep” as his revenge begins. Hamlet (Samuel Blenkin) sings a scrap of “Scatterbrain” when he is at his lowest. The makers told Pitchfork they first tried “Myxomatosis” for Ophelia's madness, found it too literal and started again; it survives only in fragments.

Yorke did the orchestrations, but none of Radiohead are on stage. Using the music as a ‘presence’ in the room, watching how it collides with the action and the text. Ghosting one against the other² Six musicians play in glass-fronted booths at the foot of a castle wall, and the two singers, Ed Begley and Megan Hill, appear in doorways and windows above. Yorke, speaking to Pitchfork, compared the set-up to Peter Strickland's film Berberian Sound Studio.

Christine Jones adapted the play with Steven Hoggett and the two direct it; with Yorke, they are billed as its co-creators. Paul Hilton doubles as Claudius and the Ghost. The play-within-a-play and most of the comedy are gone, and the evening runs about one hour 50 minutes without an interval. It plays Manchester until 18 May, then the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon from 4 to 28 June. There are no London dates.

Curtis gives it four stars, a powerful total artwork that overreaches in places. MK Bennett of Louder Than War is rapturous, and singles out Begley's wordless high singing as the voice that stands in for Yorke's. Andrew Neal of Silent Radio calls it unmissable and admires Tredrea's singing; Blenkin, he finds, catches Yorke's vulnerable tone when he sings. Wray finds a true Hamlet in it, neither a playback of the album nor a Radiohead musical.

Where the songs fall, as the reviews heard them