By Holly Simms
Thom Yorke and Hamlet, if you are a self-confessed, somewhat pretentious student of the arts, an admirer of the trope of the tortured artist, or ideally both, has a combination ever made more sense or had a greater natural appeal? April 2025 will allow this question to be realised as Radiohead’s sixth studio album and Shakespeare’s longest and arguably greatest work are reworked to form a coalition and come to the stage in the form of ‘Hamlet Hail to the Thief.’
‘Are you such a dreamer, to put the world to rights? I’ll stay home forever, where two and two always makes up five.’ These opening lines of Yorke’s album allow anyone familiar with the basic workings of ‘Hamlet’ and its profoundly mentally complex protagonist to see the thematic links between the two creative masterpieces. However, it was theatre director Christine Jones who spoke the connection aloud, allowing for this reworking to be conceived. In an interview regarding the project she discussed the psychological impact of seeing Radiohead live in 2003, the year Hail to the Thief was released, recalling, ‘it changed my DNA.’ She then goes on to ponder on its Shakespearean echoes, stating, ‘Not long after, I was reading Hamlet and listening to the album. […] There are uncanny reverberances between the text and the album.’ Additionally, Yorke has said he finds this project an ‘interesting and intimidating challenge’ with the RSC claiming the result of this challenge to be a ‘feverish new live experience, fusing theatre, music and movement.’
But what is it that makes this collaboration genuinely exciting? Shakespeare’s folio has been reworked, reworked, and reworked again, often with fairly dismal consequences. As an excited, newly inspired fan of Shakespeare I headed to the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at 16 years old to watch their production of ‘Richard III,’ a favourite play to this day. However, I found myself greeted with Richard and the rest of the cast in sports strips, forcing comedy and delivering Shakespeare’s meter in a manner which made it appear they were about to burst into freestyle rap. When attending a production of Shakespeare I don’t generally wish to feel on edge with concern that Lin Manuel Miranda might jump out of the stalls at any given moment.
This production is just one example of an endless list of Shakespearean reworkings that fall short of their expected critical reception, often deemed to be jarringly stripping the productions of their original integrity. Granted, this ‘integrity’ often includes prominent themes of patriarchal oppression, with Shakespeare’s supposed ‘heroines’ rarely given the opportunity to be even somewhat developed characters. However, as upsetting as these themes can be to explore in theatrical characterisation, if in every modern production of these plays, we must turn their original structures on their heads, are we still performing Shakespeare at all? Or do we just feel so collectively guilty for hyper-canonising the ‘Bard’ and his misogynistic tendencies in the way we have, that we must make the plays an ode to today’s rightful quest for equality as to allow them into our modern creative spaces?
Herein lies the crux of what I find to be appealing about the upcoming ‘Hamlet Hail to the Thief,’ I am hopeful that it will be able to find balance. Radiohead’s emotive melodies and lyrics that act as the building blocks for ‘Hail to the Thief’ hit so precisely on the themes of mental turmoil, paranoia, and grief that bleed from ‘Hamlet’s’ every syllable. Hamlet’s impassioned musing of ‘what piece of work is man!’ appears to be a line of thought that has resonated with Yorke across much of his musical career as he explores the psyche and its failings consistently and in great detail from ‘Pablo Honey’ through to ‘A Moon Shaped Pool.’ When this music soundtracks the conflicted, poisoned and often stagnated mind of Hamlet I am hoping that the play’s, still deeply relevant, discussion of the human condition will be what audiences are left most focussed on. Consequently the play should be able to modernise itself; as the reason for its hyper-canonisation becomes clear, it speaks to what is innately human in all of us, time period irrelevant.
When the original core of the play is left intact having been exposed against the sounding board of Yorke’s art, today’s audiences should then be leaving feeling encouraged to contemplate the problematic elements of the play on their own, without having them thrust upon them. Ophelia’s quiet power in the face of dehumanising oppression, possibly unintentionally present in the text, can float its way to the fore of the mind naturally with the support of Yorke’s soundtrack. Shakespeare’s misogyny and its modern reverberations can therefore be able to co-exist with his genius as each layer of the play can be exposed intentionally and evenly without a clunky imposition of creative guilt heaped atop the play’s 4,167 lines.
Although there is much more to be said on the complexity of modernising Shakespeare and the challenge of locating its resonance within modern media, not much more can be said on this production in hope. Having bought tickets for the show in its first release I hope to be proved right in my high estimation of its quality. However, they do say never meet your heroes and perhaps the seemingly ideal combination of an all-time favourite band and one of the greatest works of literature created may not quite meet the mark. Nevertheless, ideally, I will not be left still roaming the creative ether in hope of one day finding the perfect Shakespearean reworking.