Steven Hoggett talks Hamlet Hail to the Thief and Radiohead

Steven Hoggett, who co-directs Hamlet Hail to the Thief with Christine Jones, has told Julia Rank of London Theatre about a moment in the Manchester rehearsals of 2025. While Hamlet's duel scene was being worked out, Thom Yorke, whose Radiohead music the show uses, went over to the show's musicians, and Hoggett says that was when what the actors did and what the musicians played locked together. The Manchester premiere was rehearsed in three weeks.

Shakespeare's text was cut for the staging, losing its repetition and the long speeches that report what happens offstage. Ophelia, played by Ami Tredrea, has more to do than usual. She shares “To be or not to be” with Samuel Blenkin's Hamlet, and in a passage of about two minutes, set to a Radiohead song, the two are seen happily in love, which Hoggett points out Shakespeare's text never shows.

Hoggett took to Radiohead in his twenties. The Bends astonished him and OK Computer was something else again. He says the band change the rules with each record, and that they and Shakespeare both put awkward questions.

Hoggett co-founded the theatre company Frantic Assembly and won the 2009 Olivier Award for best theatre choreographer for Black Watch, a play about soldiers in Iraq. The London run at the Barbican is now in previews. Of the earlier runs, Hoggett says Manchester was like a gig and the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford brought an audience that knew its Shakespeare, and the show worked for both.