Reviews Round-up of Hamlet Hail to the Thief – Aviva Studios & The RSC

"Thom Yorke masterminds a stunning collision of worlds"

"A reworked score of Radiohead’s sixth album backs an adaptation that even Shakespeare’s great tragedy has never seen the likes of before."

"The biggest triumph of the night though is just how well this album complements the dialogue onstage, with Yorke drawing and building on album hooks with illuminating nuance and subtlety."

"Even though this is a performance that’s clearly been years in the making, refreshingly, the production never loses its sense of impulsivity or humility."

"Much like the play itself, the songs capture just about every kind of human emotion as they toil like turbulent lullabies – with highlights from the truly disarming ‘There, There’ jutting out. The actors also deliver stunning solo vocal performances, with Hamlet delivering a soul-striking rendition of ‘Scatterbrain’."

"Hamlet Hail to the Thief is unmissable drama at Aviva Studios"

"The world premiere production fuses Shakespeare with the music of Radiohead - and the results are achingly cool"

"And the fractured moments of musical brilliance from the live band and musicians on stage will make you want to run and listen to Radiohead albums on repeat straight after. It's all delivered in a style that makes you feel like you're bingeing on an unmissable new Netflix drama, rather than watching a classic Shakespeare fable unfold."

"Radiohead plus Shakespeare? Yes please"

"These two very different works have been fused into an urgent, frantic 100-minute work that’s part drama, part dance piece and part gig"

"Who knew that the world needed a mashup of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy and Radiohead’s angry response to George W Bush’s 2003 election victory? But it turns out we very much do. For this bonkers, extraordinary event, play and album have been smashed into one another by co-creators Christine Jones, Steven Hoggett and the band’s frontman and creative driver Thom Yorke. The resulting fragments have been brutally sieved, the grist fused into an urgent, frantic 100-minute work that’s part drama, part dance piece and part gig."

"... Samuel Blenkin’s frail and compelling Hamlet looks kind of like a tousle-haired indie frontman who’s been starving himself of food and sleep in pursuit of an elusive, anguished lyric."

"The script has been brutally but expertly pruned, the songs mostly atomised into repeated, wordless phrases or note progressions"

"... the show is exactly the sort of shot in the arm that the RSC’s new artistic directors, Tamara Harvey and Daniel Evans, needed to give the organisation."

"Study of righteous anger links Shakespeare to Radiohead"

"Collaboration with Thom Yorke is worth hype in tragedy played with clarity and verve"

"... a startling performance by Samuel Blenkin"

"With Frantic Assembly’s Hoggett at the wheel, this is a Hamlet which, even at a brisk 100 minutes, finds time for physical-theatre sequences to embody a world out of kilter."

"And, yes, believe the hype: Yorke’s arrangements are tremendous. Performed by a five-piece band, isolated in sound booths and accompanied with much reverb by singers Megan Hill and Ed Begley, it rumbles and twitches, erupting in great swells of electro-rock noise at the moments of greatest intensity."

"There is a touch of the Grand Guignol in the spectacle and the odd narrative shortcut, but Hamlet Hail to the Thief works as a lucid, angsty revenge tragedy, played with clarity and verve."

"This is Samuel Blenkin’s play"

"Technically spectacular, Radiohead’s 2003 concept album in conversation with Shakespeare is an innovation in form"

"Both play and album capture the uneasy feeling of losing grip on reality when those in authority cannot be trusted; 2 + 2 = 5 and something is rotten in the state of Denmark."

"The play has been cut down to under two hours, a lean collection of its greatest hits. The focus is on Hamlet’s themes rather than the story, without weight given to the text and it risks becoming untethered from its emotional stakes."

"Samuel Blenkin is Hamlet, and this is his play. A wide-eyed Shakesperean triple threat, he not only delivers in terms of speech and complex movement, but also musically."

"In this piece, both works are fractured, reflecting back to each other: a dramatic and musical conversation executed as a scenographic spectacular."

"Radiohead’s Shakespearean maelstrom"

"This multi-layered production set to music by the band may leave newcomers scrambling to keep track of the drama at Elsinore"

"Well, it’s one of those multi-layered offerings where so many elements are thrown together — contemporary dance is part of the package too — that it’s difficult to keep track of what’s left of the actual drama."

"Any project with Paul Hilton in a supporting role will have its rewards; here he constantly has us in his grip as a feverishly unstable Claudius. And what a sinuous dancer he makes, too. The music, reassembled in tantalising slivers, is more uneven."

"As Hamlet himself, Samuel Blenkin is a clever piece of casting: he broods and sulks like a teenager taking refuge behind a bedroom door. Some of his speeches may be reduced to soundbites, yet he makes the most of them."

"... Jess Williams’s choreography always caught the eye, evoking a court in turmoil and a prince on the edge of a meltdown."

"Hamlet Hail to the Thief is a discordant union of Shakespeare and Radiohead"

"There’s more madness than method to an ambitious adaptation at Aviva Studios, Manchester"

"The play’s not really the thing in Aviva Studios’ Hamlet Hail to the Thief, which uneasily fuses Shakespeare’s tragedy with Radiohead’s 2003 album. The join is about as seamless as the production’s clunky title indicates: the two jockey for position, with Radiohead often coming out ahead. Still, sparks do fly from the friction."

"Instead of the songs festooning the play, however, it often feels like the atomised scenes are used as segues between the music. Running at an unusually brisk 105 minutes, the production offers a medley of abridged Hamlet greatest hits."

"Directors Steven Hoggett and Christine Jones telescope the production on the psychodrama between Hamlet and Claudius. But turning the play into a brash, scrappy revenge thriller leaves multiple casualties."

"It’s a dizzyingly — rather than dazzlingly — propulsive show. “The rest is silence”, Horatio tells us when it’s all over. If only Yorke let us hear it."

"With Thom Yorke on board as a creative, this quixotic project smashes up the best Shakespeare play and the fourth best Radiohead album to create strange new shapes"

"Radiohead’s music is paranoid and existential and in that sense band and play are a solid match. But it never seems obvious why this album, beyond a programme note that states Jones had the idea when she saw the band on the Hail to the Thief tour."

"What it’s definitely not is Hail to the Thief! The Hamlet Musical: most of the songs aren’t performed by the cast, but rather singers Ed Begley and Megan Hill, and none of the tracks get complete, uncut run throughs"

"Flipping things around, it’s not entirely obvious what Hamlet is gaining from any of this"

"Ultimately this is a quixotic endeavour – it is almost inconceivable that an old Radiohead album might offer some deeper key to unlocking Hamlet than, say, a really good three-and-a-half hour production of Hamlet."

"Shakespeare dances to Radiohead’s tune"

"It makes sense to link Thom Yorke’s music and the Bard’s tragedy – but this hurtling experiment only occasionally flares into brilliance"

"... in the eerie-cryptic vocals of Thom Yorke can lie, at times, an aura of existential insight as potent as any Shakespearean soliloquy. It makes a strange sort of sense, then, to attempt to bring together the best-known tragedy in the canon with the jittery, haunting, disquieting music of one of the UK’s most internationally revered bands."

"However laudable that aim, the result is a hurtling experiment that only intermittently flares into brilliance. At its best, the evening (under two hours, sans interval) combines concentrated doses of the play with a distilled essence of the music that burns hard, and fuses dance-theatre with due reverence for speech. Often, though, the play sounds truncated and the music – performed live, with a band in a row of sealed-off booths – too background-ish and incidental."

"In ‘Hamlet Hail to the Thief,’ Radiohead Riffs on Shakespeare"

"The band’s frontman, Thom Yorke, created a show with the Royal Shakespeare Company that is both admirably ambitious and a little foolish."

"There is plenty in the album, both aesthetically and thematically, that resonates with Shakespeare’s tale of usurpation, revenge and self-doubt"

"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"

"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"

"... 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"