Radiohead meets the Bard: a mash-up for the ages — and kryptonite for purists, you might think. But a new, dance-infused take on “Hamlet,” set to the band’s 2003 LP, “Hail to the Thief,” which opened in Manchester, England, on Wednesday, is no mere gimmick.
There is plenty in the album, both aesthetically and thematically, that resonates with Shakespeare’s tale of usurpation, revenge and self-doubt: the title’s allusion to political infamy, the music’s gloomy timbre, the anxiously introspective lyrics. Immediately, the album’s opening line — “Are you such a dreamer / To put the world to rights?” — has echoes of Hamlet’s famous speech, “The time is out of joint, O cursed spite / That ever I was born to set it right!”
“Hamlet Hail to the Thief” — co-directed by Christine Jones and Steven Hoggett for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and co-created by the Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke — runs at Aviva Studios through May 18 before transferring to the company’s home in Stratford-upon-Avon in June. Jones is best known as a set designer, and Hoggett as a choreographer. (They worked together on “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” for which Jones won a Tony in 2018.) In this interpretation, the story is drastically abridged — clocking in at comfortably under two hours — and there is a strong emphasis on music and visuals.
The onstage action is interspersed with subtly reworked snippets and deconstructed riffs from the Radiohead songs. A group of musicians, supervised by Tom Brady, plays behind glass at the rear of the stage, while two singers belt out vocals from a balcony. The actors periodically slip into trance-like dance moves, combining strange, synchronized gesticulations with an assortment of tumbling, swirling and rolling motions. They dance a creepy waltz to the funky bass line of “Go to Sleep,” and the song’s chorus — “Something big is gonna happen / Over my dead body” — portentously signposts the carnage that is to come.
The music and movement combine to evoke a suitably eerie sense of menace, although it’s a shame that the production’s smartly rendered monochrome aesthetic has become so commonplace — thanks in large part to to its deployment in successive high-profile Jamie Lloyd productions — that it scarcely registers. Black-clad actors, a little obscured by smoke; a dark stage illuminated by stark spotlights or neon rectangles: It’s a gloaming-by-numbers, almost too crisp to be spooky. (The set design is by the collective AMP Scenography, in collaboration with Sadra Tehrani.)
Samuel Blenkin plays the title role with an endearing blend of pouting, schoolboy recalcitrance and self-effacing ennui. And Paul Hilton brings a stringy physicality to Hamlet’s uncle, Claudius, whose murder of Hamlet’s father, and swift marriage to his mother, Gertrude, sets up the story. In this rendering Claudius is a guilt-ridden nervous wreck, puffing on a cigarette as he prays, and even more twitchy than the Black Prince himself. At one point, the two men engage in a spotlit dance, their bodies tangling and their heads butting, to symbolize their conflict.
But the other characters don’t quite come to life in this inevitably somewhat rushed telling. We never get a chance to settle in their company, so their woes ring hollow: Claudia Harrison’s Gertrude is frantic, but more in the manner of someone contesting a parking ticket than a recently bereaved widow who has ill-advisedly married her brother-in-law; the pathos of Ami Tredrea’s Olivia feels unearned, and therefore overwrought.
And the dance, though arresting in itself, has the regrettable effect of sucking energy out of the drama. At times, the dialogue feels so incongruous with the mise-en-scène that it’s as though Hamlet has stumbled across a funereal tai chi troupe.
This production seeks to retell “Hamlet” in a manner that transcends language, distilling it to an essence. Since language is integral to Shakespeare’s enduring appeal, this is both admirably ambitious and a little foolish.
“Hamlet Hail to the Thief” is a compelling spectacle, and boasts perhaps the most accomplished tribute band I have ever seen. The singers, Ed Begley and Megan Hill, imbue the Radiohead songs with an ethereal beauty more than worthy of Yorke himself. (Two numbers sung by Blenkin and Tredrea are also impressive.) But it feels like a little Shakespeare has been added to Radiohead’s music, rather than the other way around. The production can take a place in the pantheon of flawed but worthwhile undertakings, like those bloated concept albums of the 1970s that were forerunners to “Hail to the Thief.”
