Peter Viney's Blog

By William Shakespeare
Adapted by Christine Jones with Stephen Hoggett
Music by Radiohead
Orchestrations by Thom Yorke

Co-creators / Co Directors: Stephen Hoggett, Chistine Jones, Thom Yorke
Scenography by AMP FEat. Sadra Tehrani
RSC / Factory International co-production

Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
Wednesday 11th June 2025, 19.45

CAST:

Hamlet – Samuel Blenkin
Claudius – Paul Hilton
Gertrude – Claudia Harrison
Ophelia – Ami Tredrea
Polonius – Tom Peters
Horatio – Alby Baldwin
Laertes – Brandon Grace
Guildenstern – Felipe Pachecho
Rosencrantz – James Cooney
Gravedigger / Player Queen / Barnardo- Romaya Weaver
Off Stage Swing: Daniel Davids, Keiran Garland, Marienella Philips

Keys / Associate Musical Director – Tom Knowles
Keys – Tom Brady
Bass guitar- Joe Downard
Guitar – Adam Martin, Jenny Clifford
Vocals – Ed Begley, Megan Hill
Drums- Shane Forbes

It is the year of Hamlet. A straight version and two sideways looks on it at the RSC. A full version at Chichester.

FROM THE RSC SITE:
Shakespeare’s great tragedy and Radiohead’s critically acclaimed album collide for a feverish experience that fuses theatre, music, and movement. In this frenetic distillation of Shakespeare’s masterpiece, Elsinore has become a surveillance state and hectic runs in the blood of its citizens. Hamlet Hail to the Thief centres on Hamlet and Ophelia’s awakening to the lies and corruption revealed by ghosts and music. Paranoia reigns and no one is spared a tragic unravelling. In this adaptation, music becomes an integral part of the narrative. Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke has reworked the band’s critically acclaimed album into a deconstructed score that illuminates the text and is performed by live musicians.

I’m not into Radiohead, but not against them either. I have OK Computer somewhere, but it never got through to me, though it was a friend’s great favourite. Hail To The Thief is the 2003 album combined with Hamlet here.

The album title was a pastiche of the presidential theme, Hail to the Chief, aimed at George W. Bush winning the election from Al Gore, so that really comes back to resonate with a far bigger thief today. The Elsinore connection is a usurping ruler. I thought I should listen to it first. Amazon resellers have it at £26 to £49 so it seems out of print. With all the publicity you’d expect them to re-issue it. After all it was a #1 album in the UK and #3 in the USA. Just as I was bemoaning the price, I found a secondhand copy in my local record shop. £3.

Every song has a title and a different title in brackets. So it was my pre-show listening, I see no connection to Hamlet. Thom Yorke has said some lines come from Dante’s Inferno in places. Over to Andrzej Lukowski at Time Out who knows the music:

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. I believe every song from the record is included in some form or other, but that just makes it more perplexing: the likes of ‘A Punch Up At A Wedding’, ‘Myxomatosis’ and ‘A Wolf at the Door’ are reduced to (quite pleasant) instrumental riffs that suggest it was deemed conceptually important to cram every track in. But was it, really? 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 – even the album’s majestic top five hit ‘There There’ is played largely instrumentally.
Time Out 8 May 2025

It’s very rock concert. There is a merchandise stand next to the ice creams and programmes, not just the one in the shop. No, they don’t have the album but they have Thom Yorke’s latest record and T-shirts at £40 or rock star price.

It is a completely different audience to RSC’s normal, perhaps not so much on the regular members choice of seats in front stalls where we were, but overall, and even the upper gallery was packed. That was reflected in a rare for RSC standing ovation at the end. There was a major buzz of excitement before it started.

It’s 100 to 110 minutes minutes long with no interval. I don’t usually approve of no interval, but the level of high intensity was such that it could not have had an interval. It never felt long. Most of the discussion is on music and drama, but both of us were bowled over by the choreography and movement. It is heavily abridged for the longest play of them all. The lines are the “greatest hits” and in a different order much of the time. Given music and dance, I doubt there was much more than an hour of the text. It was replaced highly effectively by movement.

The movement is angular, stark, enhanced by the music, and in particular a great drummer in Shane Forbes. The programme notes that one inspiration was Egon Schiele’s art with distorted figures. Claudius and Gertrude are cast tall to emphasize that. Polonius fits the pattern too. Looking at the cast bios, it’s hard to believe their general background is acting, not dance centred musicals. They use Fender guitar amplifiers as temporary platforms throughout and shift them around.

Thom Wolfe was adamant that it had to have a live band. It’s not Radiohead, but it’s not a tribute band either. These are different arrangements. The band are in separate sound booths across the set. They have two singers (often wordless) who appear in doorways above.

This production pulls the essence of the play forefront, and that is Hamlet’s view of what’s happening. So there’s a passionate first dance love scene with Ophelia (absolutely brilliant from both). Is it mutual or in Hamlet’s mind? Later he stands at the back watching Claudius and Gertrude locked in an extremely sexual dance / embrace (also brilliant). Sub plots are ruthlessly extinguished. For the second time this year an RSC Hamlet drops Fortinbras. I was surprised, given how heavily it was cut, that they even bothered to retain two references to Fortinbras, who is tramping around with a hostile Norwegian army. Perhaps it was to show Claudius’s paranoia and stress. For me, you can cut Fortinbras altogether. My drama tutor always held that Fortinbras was stage management, not a character, and his role was to have the bodies carried off the open Globe stage, rather than have them stand up and shuffle off (We’re not REALLY dead. It’s only a play.) The National Theatre made sense of it in the “West Wing” Hamlet where Fortinbras becomes an exact replacement for Claudius. Nothing changes. The best use of Fortinbras I’ve seen. Here Horatio has the end on their own, and very well too.

The play is intense. Dramatic, even melodramatic, gestures are big, poses are strong but it works.

Hamlet works best for me looking young, played with a ‘A Star is Born’ energy (and Samuel Blenkin fits “a star is born.”). Rory Kinnear was 32, but receding hairline aged him. Benedict Cumberbatch looked too old at 39. Branagh played it at 37. Too old. Olivier was 41, and looked ludicrously too old. Jonathan Slinger at 41 looked older too, but then the USP of that RSC production was Hamlet as the nerd upstairs who wouldn’t leave home or rather moved back in.

Both 2025 productions feature Hamlets who look young, Luke Thallon earlier in the year, and now Samuel Blenkin. I looked it up, and they’re both 29. Blenkin looks much younger than that, like Bob Dylan in 1961. The text sets Hamlet as late 20s – Yorick has been dead for 23 years and Hamlet can remember playing with him.

Few of us remember much before five (or rather didn’t until cheap photos, then digital photos and videos reminded kids). It sets Hamlet as 27 to 30. Shakespeare was aware he needed an experienced actor to go through the original four hour text, and may have thought it best to go late 20s (the prime of life surely at the time). I like him younger to the point where I’d shift the 23 years ago line. ‘Three and ten?’ Hamlet as twenty-one? Belkin plays him as young. Impetuous, but not impetuous enough to kill Claudius. Quick to go into total rage too. He puts so much fury in that it must be hard on matinee days.

Claudius and Gertrude then need to look capable of violently passionate sexual attraction, well, let’s not be ageist, but more capable than say Charles and Camilla appear. So forties rather than sixties.

Polonius too is much stronger here. He’s not a bumbling old fart, and he’s not played for comedy in spite of retaining some key lines. He gets the first F-bomb directed at him:

Hamlet: You cannot, sir, take from me anything that I will not more willingly part – except my life … you tedious old fucking fool!

I can’t find that in any of my editions. BUT this is a popular version. As above, this was not the regular RSC crowd. Let it make more converts to Shakespeare from those who came for Radiohead’s music.

A change is that Hamlet appears to kill Polonius by accident when Polonius grabs Hamlet from behind and Hamlet has a knife in his hand. No, it’s supposed to be deliberate because he thinks it’s Claudius hiding behind the arras and stabs through. That’s quite a serious plot deviation. A minus point, though Gertrude’s reaction is excellent.

Gertrude does a heartfelt Fuck! before trying to clean up the blood from the floor. Possibly not one for the textual purists then. When Polonius is killed, we hear the most recognizable hit, There There.

Ophelia is powerful, with a lengthy programme note on the vision they have of her. I had never realised that the herbs she mentions (though not here) were believed to be menstruation and abortion inducers in Jacobean England. This is not a wispy needy girl in white muslin wafting about. She does one of the songs instead of the singers., Sail To The Moon (Brush The Cobwebs Out of The Sky) to show she has lost her marbles. Hamlet also gets a song when he returns from England, and sings Scatterbrain (As Dead As Leaves).

The players scene demonstrates the style as everyone parades on with jerky arm movements. IThe choreography is aide by how tight the cast are (in a musical sense). I think the photos are Manchester, because Hamlet sat on the edge of the upper stage watching, not in line at the RSC. The trio perform the play in stylised mime.

I couldn’t list the text shifts in the order, but a major one is To be or not to be. Hamlet says it with Ophelia on stage. Then before Ophelia plunges to her death, we get a second rendering of To be or not to be from her. Then on line shifts, Claudius talks about a fucking axe.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are a pair but not the nerdy double act. One is a lecher, looking Ophelia and Getrude up and down lasciviously, the other disapproves. Again, tremendous movement in unison and separately.

You wouldn’t want to mess with Laertes, a memorable performance.

The final fight is dance / fight and one of most violent and energetic I’ve seen. The picture doesn’t do the twisting, leaping, kicking, grabbing justice. It’s great fight direction.

You wait years for a 5 star Hamlet, then this year, two of them come along a few months apart. Both at the RSC. You don’t get many standing ovations at the RSC. This did.
*****

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID

It played Manchester too, which is the source of reviews. There are some bizarre ones (not linked), including “It takes place in Denmark” and that Gertrude was forced to seek Claudius’ protection in a misogynistic world but didn’t like him.

5 star
Rhys Buchanan, Rolling Stone *****

4 star
Guardian ****
What’s On Stage ****
The Stage ****

3 star
Andrzej Lukowski, Time Out ***

LINKS ON THIS BLOG

HAMLET
Hamlet – NT 2010 Rory Kinnear as Hamlet
Hamlet- Young Vic 2011 Michael Sheen as Hamlet
Hamlet RSC 2013 Jonathan Slinger as Hamlet
Hamlet – Globe 2014
Hamlet – Maxine Peake, NT Live Broadcast from Manchester Royal Exchange
Hamlet- Benedict Cumberbatch, 2015, Barbican, London
Hamlet, RSC 2016 Paapa Essiedu as Hamlet, Stratford
Hamlet, Almeida 2017, BBC 2018, Andrew Scott as Hamlet
Hamlet, RSC 2025, Luke Thallon as Hamlet
Hamlet: Hail To The Thief, RSC 2025, Samuel Blenkin as Hamlet
Hamlet, Chichester 2025 Giles Terera as Hamlet
+
Fat Ham, by James IJames, RSC 2025

PAUL HILTON
wonder.land, National Theatre
All New People by Zach Braff, London 2012

BRANDON GRACE
Much Ado About Nothing, National Theatre 2022

JAMES COONEY
Measure for Measure RSC 2019
The Taming of The Shrew, RSC 2019
Troilus & Cressida, RSC 2018
King Lear, RSC 2016
Cymbeline, RSC 2016
Hamlet, RSC 2016

TOM PETERS
Girl From The North Country, Old Vic 2017

AMI TREDREA
The Crucible, National Theatre 2022