This Shakespeare remix has been more than two decades in the making, going back to 2003 when co-creator Christine Jones saw Radiohead at Madison Square Gardens playing tracks from their then-latest album, Hail to the Thief, a title taken from anti-Bush protests following his controversial election win over Gore, but Jones saw in them a parallel with Shakespeare's Hamlet.
She suggested this to the band's frontman, Thom Yorke, who always saw the album as "the record that got away" as it was recorded very quickly, and he has taken the opportunity to break it down and use the music in a different way, "broken down, shattered pieces of glass, glued back together".
With a running time of an hour and fifty, which would barely get you to the interval (which this doesn't have) for many productions of this play, there are obviously going to be heavy cuts, especially when you factor in the insertion of songs and co-creator Steve Hoggett's movement sequences, which sometimes tell parts of the story cut from the dialogue in brief and sometimes are more abstract, setting the mood of the characters. But as Factory Artistic Director John McGrath explains in the programme, this is "neither a play nor an album, but an exploration of the psychological states evoked by the two source works". The main beats of the play are there, but how they relate to one another may be a little baffling to someone not already familiar with the story.
Radiohead's music is insistent throughout the piece, varying, like many of their songs, from sweet and reflective to loud and noisy in a moment. Lisa Duncan's costume designs have put the cast into modern-looking office wear, though casually worn by many, as dark and monochromatic as the set by AMP featuring Sadra Tehrani, in which, coincidentally, amps play a major part—guitar amps are moved around the stage to act as seats and platforms, and the backdrop has several large loudspeakers visibly integrated into it. The musicians—Tom Brady and Tom Knowles on keys, Jenny Clifford on guitar, Joe Downard on bass and Shane Forbes on drums—are visible through windows below a platform used for a number of scenes and for the two singers, Ed Begley and Megan Hill, to occasionally enter; presumably they are commenting on what is happening below, but their words are swamped by a muddy sound mix and heavy reverb.
Will Duke's projections produce the ghost of Hamlet senior and Ophelia's river amongst other things, as well as adding subtle movement to the lighting by Jessica Hung Han Yun. The ghost is played by Paul Hilton on film, who also (live) plays a louche, casual Claudius—think Bill Nighy, or perhaps Jarvis Cocker—opposite a strong performance from Claudia Harrison as his wife, Gertrude. Tom Peters is an annoying, pedantic administrator as Polonius—or, as Hamlet refers to him in a slight departure from Shakespeare, a "tedious fucking fool".
Samuel Blenkin's angry but clearly spoken emo Hamlet is believable and relatable throughout as he justifies his actions with conviction, but there are some interesting twists on his relationship with Ami Tredrea's Ophelia, which is shown as being more obviously sexual than it is often portrayed. This Ophelia is a strong, modern woman though with the expectations on her of a medieval royal court, and her motivations are less flaky and ambiguous than usual. Hamlet's "to be or not to be" speech is spoken directly to her rather than to himself, and, after singing a powerful song, she repeats his words before she drowns in the river, staged simply but spectacularly, making this a conscious choice rather than an accident due to her mental state.
Although some moments such as this are powerful, others are glossed over in a way that makes them unclear. While Hamlet speaks of using the play to trap the King, he never speaks to the players, and the play itself is done in silence, with the King suddenly standing up and rushing out without comment. The stabbing of Polonius is a bit scrappy and unconvincing, and the final fight between Hamlet and Brandon Grace's fiery Laertes is hand-to-hand, with one dagger between them, and again it is performed swiftly with people suddenly and wordlessly dropping dead until Hamlet performs his dying speech. While the threat of Fortinbras is still referred to, he doesn't appear at the end, leaving Alby Baldwin's Horatio to deliver his shortened summary directly to the audience to finish the play.
As McGrath suggested, this isn't a production for Shakespeare purists—or even those wanting a clear narrative—and possibly not for Radiohead purists either, but together they do produce something flawed but intriguing and definitely worth checking out, if you can get a ticket. It will be interesting to see what the regulars at the RSC make of it when it moves to Stratford in June.