Thom Yorke's Hamlet Hail to the Thief names its Barbican company

Hamlet Hail to the Thief, the staging of Shakespeare set to Thom Yorke's reworking of Hail to the Thief, has named its full cast and band for its London premiere at the Barbican Theatre, which opens on 31 October and runs to 23 January. Samuel Blenkin is again Hamlet and Ami Tredrea Ophelia. Nicolas Tennant, last seen in Mother Courage and Her Children at the Globe, joins as Polonius.

Yorke made the show with the directors Steven Hoggett and Christine Jones, who worked together on Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and American Idiot. He took the album apart into a score that the cast of musicians and actors plays live on stage; Radiohead themselves are not in it. The play is cut hard, to about an hour and 40 minutes with no interval, and its Elsinore is a surveillance state whose lies Hamlet and Ophelia learn of from ghosts and from the music.

London follows the world premiere at Aviva Studios in April 2025 and a season with the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon that summer, and both sold out.

Paul Hilton again doubles Claudius and the Ghost, and Claudia Harrison plays Gertrude. Among the new names, Miles Barrow is Rosencrantz and Merryl Ansah the Gravedigger, and Halim Diwani, one of the understudies, will make his professional stage debut. The whole band from the first night in Manchester is back, led by Tom Brady as music supervisor and music director.

I'm into finally bringing 'Hamlet Hail to The Thief' to London, and to the Barbican of all places!

Thom Yorke⁸

Yorke said when the Barbican announced the run in June. For Jones the building itself was the point. Bringing this brutal play into the Barbican's brutalist space seems fated.⁸

The run