Thom Yorke tells how Hail to the Thief ended up beside Hamlet

Hamlet Hail to the Thief opened at Aviva Studios in Manchester on 27 April, and Thom Yorke and the co-directors, Christine Jones and Steven Hoggett, have been telling how Radiohead's 2003 album came to be set to Shakespeare's play. The run is in Manchester until 18 May, then at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford from 4 to 28 June.

Yorke did the orchestrations, his first work for the theatre, and spoke to the Observer on the eve of the first night. I can confirm that Hamlet was not in our minds when we made the record.¹ Nor was the title much about politics, he says. It came more from his own lack of self-belief at the time. Jonny [Greenwood] begged me not to call it that. To some extent he was right, but I was like, 'It's all I've got, man.'¹

The idea is Jones's, and it goes back to 2003. She saw Radiohead play the new songs at Madison Square Garden that October, and a few months later, designing a production of Hamlet and writing out its text, she had the album playing and kept hearing the two answer each other. She points to lines in “2+2=5” and “The Gloaming”, and to the way the play and the album both open with a question. Jones had worked with Yorke on the Kid A Mnesia Exhibition in 2021, and Rolling Stone Italia reports that over Christmas 2022, isolating with Covid, she began cutting the play into a script with Hail to the Thief on her headphones.

Yorke's first thought was that Hamlet was untouchable and that setting Radiohead to it would be sacrilege, but the idea stayed with him. But I'm always up for a little bit of sacrilege.² The whole band, he says, felt they had unfinished business with the album. Recording it went well, but finishing and mixing it was hard and no fun, and he had long thought of it as the record that got away.

He also had a hand in the casting. He suggested Samuel Blenkin for Hamlet after seeing him sing as Charles I in Mary & George, and his daughter suggested Paul Hilton, who plays Claudius, after seeing him in Doctor Faustus.

Yorke wanted no needle drops, whole tracks played to underline a big moment, and no pit orchestra, but a band really playing. Five musicians play from enclosed booths on a scaffold at the back, with two singers above them. Once Jones had cut the four-hour play to about 90 minutes and the music was laid under it, the songs could no longer run in album order or be played whole. In Rolling Stone Italia's telling, “2+2=5” sounds under the ghostly opening scene, and a frantic dance to “Where I End and You Begin” comes just before “To be or not to be”. It's very much broken down, shattered pieces of glass, glued back together.²