The average Radiohead album takes a listen or two to get into and that’s the excuse I’m pleading for Hamlet Hail to the Thief, the RSC’s mash-up of Shakespeare’s great tragedy (written around 1600) and Radiohead’s sixth album (released in 2003). I saw it at its premiere in Manchester last year and had mixed feelings. Then I saw it at its London transfer a year-and-a-bit later and had a much better time. 

I’m pretty sure the show – adapted and directed by Christine Jones and Steven Hoggett, with orchestrations by one Thom Yorke – has been tweaked and tightened a fair bit. But I mostly enjoyed it for having its measure and not trying to get overly ‘Shakespeare studies’ about what is, ultimately, a visceral experience. 

‘For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come?’ is a line said not once but twice here: first by Samuel Blenkin’s emo-y Hamlet, directing the soliloquy at Ami Tredrea’s Ophelia in anguish as his sanity ebbs away; then by Ophelia herself as she reaches the end of her own tether.

I think a way though a production that is some two hours shorter than the average production of Hamlet (one hour 40 minutes with no interval, since you ask) is to imagine it as a dream from the sleep of death: the show is an inky black, nightmarish jumble of the play’s key scenes that wilfully trades off a certain degree of coherency but none of the intensity. 

What it’s definitely not is dumbed down for 6Music dads: it’s a pummelling, gruelling descent into one man’s personal abyss. One of the niceties of a three-and-a-half-hour version is that we debate whether the Danish prince is ‘really’ mad or if it’s all subterfuge: here Blenkin lurches over edge with such abandon after meeting his father’s ghost (or something posing as it) that there is simply no question that he has become sundered from the limited sanity to be found here. And yes, you miss the depth and richness and humour of a full . Quite a lot of what makes the play great has definitely been cut. But it’s been cut in the interests of an imperfect but enthralling new vision.

It’s not 

And the sleep of death is soundtracked by Hail to the Thief. I don’t think it’s an album that has any bearing on lyrically, apart from ‘There There’s chorus ‘just ‘cos you feel it, doesn’t mean it’s there’ (an inadvertently incredible summary of the play’s themes). But the lyrics are dialled down: distorted, spread between snippets of Yorke’s recorded voice, cast members, and singers Ed Begley and Meg Hill, who periodically emerge from darkened tunnels to dispatch the odd verse. The songs tend to appear in fragmentary form. But the music is omnipresent: a doomy, glitchy, drone-heavy avant rock that gels with the production’s roaring darkness. I think you could absolutely do this same show with a different record as the soundtrack. But not only does Hail to the Thief fit, but Yorke has obviously put a lot of time in to make it do so.

It’s frustrating that we don’t get much in the way of full run throughs of songs, if only because the opening ‘2+2=5’ is so electrifyingly staged – culminating in Blenkin hollering the ‘you have not been, paying attention’ climax through a loudspeaker – that it’s a shame we don’t get the same for the likes of ‘There There’, ‘Sit Down, Stand Up’ and ‘Where You End and I Begin’. But the disassembled, reworked and near-omnipresent music is, nonetheless, highly effective – clearly more so than if it was just but with a break for a Radiohead song every 10 minutes.

Has anything changed since Manchester? I could be wrong but I think there’s new incidental music that’s not specifically tied to Hail to the Thief. I don’t think every track from the record is accounted for this time (I didn’t spot ‘We Suck Young Blood’ or ‘A Punch Up at a Wedding’) which is fine because there really was no need to crowbar all the lesser tracks in. The lead cast aren’t dancers in the traditional sense but they feel better drilled now, especially Paul Hilton’s sinuous, satanic Claudius, who seems to exist more as a diabolic fragment of Hamlet”s memory than an earthly human. The climactic duel scene has no dialogue, a virtual dance sequence: everyone dies under strobing lights, jittery choreography and the explosive ‘the raindrops, the raindrops’ electronic breakdown from ‘Sit Down, Stand Up’. I’m not convinced you’ll follow the narrative here if you don’t know it already. But the scene’s is undeniable.

Compare it to, say, the Andrew Scott or Radiohead’s shows at The O2 last year and it just doesn’t fit: expect either and you may be frustrated. It’s neither Hail to the Thief, but a strange dream of them both. All hail.

Barbican Centre, until Jan 23 2027. Buy tickets here.

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