Radiohead to work on "frenetic" adaptation of Shakespeare's Hamlet
'Hamlet Hail to the Thief' will be performed in Manchester and Stratford-upon-Avon next year
A new production of Shakespeare's Hamlet is being created, featuring the music of Radiohead.
The Oxfordshire band's frontman, Thom Yorke, has reworked the critically-acclaimed album Hail to the Thief into a "deconstructed score," according to the Royal Shakespeare Company.
The play is described as a "feverish experience that fuses theatre, music and movement."
It will open at Factory International in Manchester in April 2025, before transferring to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, the following June.
Director, Christine Jones, said seeing Radiohead's Hail to the Thief tour in 2003 "changed her DNA."
She added: "Not long after, I was reading Hamlet and listening to the album. Paying attention to the lyrics, I became aware of how many songs from Hail to the Thief speak to the themes of the play.
"There are uncanny reverberances between the text and the album. For years I've wanted to see the play and album collide in a piece of theatre; eventually I shared the idea with Thom, who was intrigued."
The challenge, according to Thom Yorke, was "interesting and intimidating.
"Adapting the original music of Hail to The Thief for live performance with the actors on stage to tell this story that is forever being told, using its familiarity and sounds, pulling them into and out of context, seeing what chimes with the underlying grief and paranoia of Hamlet, using the music as a ‘presence’ in the room, watching how it collides with the action and the text. Ghosting one against the other."
Producers say casting will be announced in due course.