Frailty, Thy Name Is Radiohead

“Are you such a dreamer to put the world to rights?”Radiohead, once one of the biggest bands in the world, currently occupy a curious position. The Oxford group have not released a record since 2016’s mournful “A Moon Shaped Pool,” and show few if any signs of wishing to record another album. They remain a going concern as an act — they played a few immediately sold out gigs in London in 2025 and will be playing a handful of concerts in Australia and Japan next year — but while each of the five members busies themselves with extracurricular projects including everything from books of photography to film scores, the hope that they will come together to produce something new is diminishing by the year. This, of course, does not mean that they will not. “In Rainbows,” arguably their greatest album and certainly their most immediately appealing, was rush-released in 2008, with purchasers being invited to pay whatever they wanted for a digital download. As with so much that Radiohead has done, it was a breathtakingly innovative and forward-looking strategy that has been imitated (or simply ripped off) by hordes of other artists, but never quite with the same pizzazz. (One honorable exception: David Bowie, who released his penultimate album, “The Next Day,” to the surprise of everyone in the world, including his record company, who thought he was long retired.) But those who wish to see tangible evidence of Radiohead in action may wish to hasten to the Barbican Center in London, where “Hamlet Hail To The Thief” has arrived after playing in Manchester and Stratford-upon-Avon last year. It is, as with all things Radiohead-related, a suitably daring and original project that will undoubtedly split opinion, although those who admire it are likely to considerably outnumber the Shakespeare or indie music purists who reject it. The idea came to its director and designer Christine Jones in 2003, when she saw the band perform tracks from their new release “Hail To The Thief.” The title was, naturally assumed to refer to George W. Bush, but Jones was struck by what she saw as pervasive lyrical allusions and callbacks to “Hamlet,” where, as she put it, “I was haunted by this idea of them being in dialogue with each other. Both look at the complexity of what it is to be human, to delude yourself and to be deluded by your government. To find your moral compass teetering within the world.” Over two decades later, the mash-up of Shakespeare and Radiohead has attracted a starry cast of actors, musicians and behind-the-scenes talent: one of those listed as a producer is none other than actor and noted muso Edward Norton, a long-standing Radiohead fan. Along with co-director Steven Hoggett, Jones has corralled an impressive cast, including Samuel Blenkin — most recently seen as the young tycoon in Noah Hawley’s “Alien: Earth” — as Hamlet, stage veteran Paul Hilton as Claudius and Claudia Harrison (Princess Anne in the final seasons of “The Crown”) as Gertrude. While Radiohead themselves are not supplying the live music, an excellent band perform the Thom Yorke-supervised arrangements, which deconstruct the songs from “Hail to the Thief” and then place them in the show in surprising and often unorthodox places. And, thanks to Jones and Hoggett’s filleting of the text, the whole shebang runs for less than two hours without an intermission, too. Shakespeare is often at the mercy of directors who wish to show off their bag of tricks, and bringing in an entire album of Radiohead songs might seem like the biggest, flashiest trick of them all. Which is why it is a pleasure to report that “Hamlet Hail To The Thief” is an unorthodox but almost entirely successful experiment in yoking two apparently disparate art forms together. What the play is not — thank God — is simply “Hamlet” the musical. It might have been easy to bring in what greatest hits Radiohead have had — one imagines the self-loathing Dane singing ‘Creep’ after failing to kill his uncle, or Claudius leading a chorus of ‘Karma Police’ after Hamlet has murdered Polonius — but this would have been an unimaginative short cut. Instead, Jones and Hoggett have grander ideas that involve stripping the text right down to its essentials, without losing a great deal of the central narrative. Fortinbras and the political dimension are gone, and most of the soliloquies are pared to the bone, but the driving narrative moves remarkably quickly, helped by something that very seldom works on stage in drama: interpretive dance. Choreographed by Jess Williams, the actors often flail about in tightly ordered chaos, signifying alternately passion, confusion and, in the final duel scene, a very fatal dance of death. It sounds resistible, but thanks to the omnipresent music — sometimes reconstructed as brooding underscore, and sometimes allowed to explode into visceral snatches of the album’s most immediate songs, including “There There” and “2 + 2 = 5” — the relationship between sound and movement is a crucial one. Of course, “Hamlet” could be — and has been — performed as ballet, with all of Shakespeare’s text stripped away, but “Hamlet Hail To The Thief” is not so radical as to jettison some of the greatest dramatic writing in the English language. Blenkin makes for a convincingly antic Dane, twitching and stamping about the stage with a mixture of rage and fear, and he is well complimented by Hilton’s diabolical Claudius, tall, thin and looking rather like a malevolent stick insect. Hilton and Harrison convey the sexual passion that Gertrude and Claudius share extremely well, and there’s some good work from Ami Tredrea’s Ophelia, who not only gets to sing ‘”Sail To The Moon” in her mad scene — which is then skillfully interpolated with the original text — but, in a breathtaking moment of directorial chutzpah, she recites “To be or not to be” before drowning herself. This is not a production for “Hamlet” purists who will bemoan some of the deeper cuts. I mainly regretted them towards the end, when the desire for fast-paced action overwhelms the sense of Hamlet knowingly going towards his own extinction, and the play’s most poignant line — “There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow” — barely lands at all. Likewise, I missed the moment where Hamlet and Laertes (understudy Halim Diwani capably taking over from Brandon Grace the night I saw it) exchange forgiveness while dying, which is a grace note that the play needs in order to achieve its full emotional impact. Yet these and other edits are, I accept, necessary for it to remain as propulsive and engaging as it is. It has not yet been announced whether “Hamlet Hail To The Thief” will transfer to the United States, but I would be amazed if the Brooklyn Academy of Music or similar venue did not wish to host the production. Until then, visitors to London, where the show runs until 23 January next year, should hasten to the Barbican to see this particular theatrical mash-up, not least because, in lieu of a Radiohead live performance at Madison Square Garden or similar, it’s as close as you’ll get to seeing them on stage any time soon.

Frailty, Thy Name Is Radiohead

Frailty, Thy Name Is Radiohead

More from the New York Sun

At Midpoint, Annual Climate Summit Leaves Activists With Little To Celebrate

Trump’s Tiny Trucks and Cars Are Coming to America

A Time To Choose: Reagan or Vance?

Cattle Virus Harmless to People for 61 Years Just Killed First Human

New Democratic Majorities Could Struggle To Move Beyond the Leftist Excesses of ‘Woke One’

Colombia Bombing Rebels, 10 Years After Peace Deal That Failed To End Fighting

Top Nvidia Shareholders Urge Board To Consider Jensen Huang’s Return

More from the New York Sun

At Midpoint, Annual Climate Summit Leaves Activists With Little To Celebrate

Trump’s Tiny Trucks and Cars Are Coming to America

A Time To Choose: Reagan or Vance?

Cattle Virus Harmless to People for 61 Years Just Killed First Human

New Democratic Majorities Could Struggle To Move Beyond the Leftist Excesses of ‘Woke One’

Colombia Bombing Rebels, 10 Years After Peace Deal That Failed To End Fighting

Top Nvidia Shareholders Urge Board To Consider Jensen Huang’s Return