Thom Yorke says he took five years to agree to Hamlet Hail to the Thief

Thom Yorke's first answer was no when Christine Jones asked him to work with her on Hamlet Hail to the Thief. Jones, who co-directs the show with Steven Hoggett and co-designed its set, had seen Radiohead at Madison Square Garden on the 2003 tour. Designing a Hamlet soon afterwards, she began matching the words of Hail to the Thief to lines of the play. In the end, Yorke tells Craig McLean of Wallpaper, it took about five years to get over the presumption of putting those two things together.¹ He came round once he saw that no staging of Hamlet is the definitive one, so no homage was needed.

The show had short runs in 2025 at Aviva Studios in Manchester and with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon. Its third, at the Barbican Theatre in London, runs from 31 October to 23 January, with Samuel Blenkin back as Hamlet. Shakespeare's text is cut to 27 scenes. All 14 songs on Hail to the Thief are in the show, rearranged by Yorke for a band that is not Radiohead. The show opens with the album's first song and closes with its last.

In April 2003, interviewed by McLean in Oxford, Yorke called Hail to the Thief a pop record and wanted it on the radio. Asked now whether it is, he says he doesn't know. Clearly, I've been thinking I've been making pop since we started! So I should probably give up.¹