Hamlet Hail to the Thief – Aviva Studios, Manchester

Picture: Manuel Harlan

Hamlet Hail to the Thief continues at Aviva Studios, Manchester until 18 May 2025.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

On the surface, Hamlet and Radiohead might seem like strange bedfellows. But the band’s 2003 album Hail to the Thief – written in the wake of 9/11 and George W Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ – is filled with angsty, angular, paranoid songs that question the motivations of those in power as well as tackling other themes of loss and isolation that chime perfectly with the sea of troubles that besiege Shakespeare’s great antihero.

Thematically then, this adaptation from Christine Jones and Steven Hoggett – the powerhouse duo who have also collaborated on such theatrical juggernauts as Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Let the Right One In and American Idiot – is already on to a winner.

But the creative team also pulls out all the stops visually, mounting a version that might be slimmed down to a lean 110 minutes narratively but viscerally plays out Shakespeare’s revenge story on a huge scale and amplifies its themes to striking effect. Design team AMP featuring Sadra Tehrani make full use of Aviva Studios’ enormous Warehouse space, with a background set that resembles a huge, grey monolithic amp, providing a vast canvas for Will Duke’s impactful projections which most notably include the monstrously massive manifestation of the ghost of Hamlet’s father.

Jess Williams’ ensemble choreography fills the stage with swirling, skittish movement that mirrors Hamlet’s inner turmoil (and, seemingly, channels Thom Yorke’s eccentric, jerky dance moves from the video for 2011’s ‘Lotus Flower’).

Those expecting Radiohead’s songs to be interpolated into a full-blown musical or presented as a staged concept album – in the vein of The Who’s Tommy or Quadrophenia – might be disappointed, however. Radiohead lead singer and chief songwriter Yorke and arranger Justin Levine have instead chopped up, remixed and reordered the album’s tracks in a way that, at least at first, punctuates and accompanies the action rather than being fully integrated into it.

So ill-fated lovers Hamlet and Ophelia dance goofily to the chorus from the album’s best-known song ‘There There’ (as a refrain, sung hauntingly by onstage vocalists Ed Begley and Megan Hill, reminds us presciently, “Just ’cause you feel it, Doesn’t mean it’s there”) and the snarling guitar riff from Orwellian opening track ‘2 + 2 = 5’ gets repeated as a stirring motif, muscularly played by the six-strong live band which is secreted in boxes on the set.

But as the story progresses, the music becomes more intertwined with the action. As Hamlet’s machinations drive her to madness, Ami Tredrea’s heartbreakingly fragile Ophelia sings lines from the plaintive ‘Sail to the Moon’, in a scene – hauntingly lit by Jessica Hung Han Yun – that culminates with her magically disappearing into the ground. As Hamlet, Samuel Blenkin does a great job of aping Yorke’s distinctive vocal style as he sings the atmospheric and off-kilter ‘Scatterbrain’ as an introduction to the play’s iconic graveside scene.

Blenkin is another of the production’s greatest assets. He gives Hamlet’s mania a vital Mad Hatter-ish energy but portrays his anguish equally well. He delivers the play’s well-trammelled soliloquies in an engagingly conversational, almost off-handedly throwaway manner and interacts believably with the other characters, especially Alby Baldwin’s similarly naturistically performed Horatio. It’s an electrifying, magnetic performance that is central to the way that the production breathes fresh life into this 400-year-old tragedy.

Chris Bartlett