Thom Yorke to Premiere Hamlet Musical, Set to the Music of Radiohead, in 2025

A theatrical mashup of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the music of Radiohead, deconstructed and reorchestrated by Thom Yorke, will premiere in the U.K. in 2025. Fusing theater, music and movement and performed live by a cast of 20 musicians and actors, Hamlet Hail to the Thief will play Aviva Studios in Manchester from April 27 to May 18, 2025, before transferring to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford Upon Avon, where it will play June 4 through 28.

Hamlet Hail to the Thief combines Shakespeare’s tragedy with Radiohead’s sixth studio album Hail to the Thief, which featured the tracks “2+2=5,” “Go to Sleep” and “There There.” The show is a collaboration between Yorke, Steven Hoggett and Christine Jones, with Hoggett and Jones directing.

“This is an interesting and intimidating challenge!” Yorke said in a statement. “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.”

In Hamlet Hail to the Thief, Elsinore has become a surveillance state. Hamlet and Ophelia awaken to the lies and corruption in Denmark, gradually revealed by ghosts and music. Blood runs hectic, paranoia reigns and no one is spared a tragic unraveling.

Radiohead recorded Hail to the Thief in the wake of the September 11 attacks and the subsequent War on Terror. One of the more haunting and unsettling records in a haunting and unsettling discography, it conjures the usual Radiohead mix of alienation, anxiety and apocalypse with Yorke's wounded-angel voice. The music of Radiohead has been combined with Shakespeare to great effect before: the band composed “Exit Music (For a Film)” for the doomed lovers of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet.

Olivier Award winner Steven Hoggett's credits as a choreographer include The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. Tony and Olivier Award winner Christine Jones directed the New York immersive nightclub experience Queen of the Night. Their projects together as choreographer and designer include Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, American Idiot and Let the Right One In.

“The first Radiohead concert I ever saw was the Hail to the Thief tour in 2003,” said Jones. “It changed my DNA. 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. I wasn't sure what we would make, but I knew I wanted to make it with Steven and continue experimenting and building on the work we've done together over many years. We've found that the play haunts the album, and the album haunts the play. Both reflect the internal disquiet and rage that result from despair—in particular, despair arising from scrutiny of dominant power structures, whether within governments, communities, or families. The text and music probe us relentlessly to question what we are made of, and how to discern right from wrong.”

“To communicate this expansive narrative, we have found it illuminating and inspiring to look to movement, text, lighting, sound and music to achieve the complexities of the storytelling,” said Hoggett. “We hope that bringing such elements into play means that anyone seeing their first ever Shakespeare will find a variety of 'ways in' to enjoy and appreciate what a spectacular play this is.”

Hamlet Hail to the Thief will feature arrangements by Justin Levine, set design by AMP Collective featuring Sadra Tehrani, sound design by Gareth Fry, music supervision by Tom Brady, video design by Will Duke, light design by Jessica Hung Han Yun, costume design by Lisa Duncan, casting direction by Charlotte Sutton for the RSC and dramaturgy and textual consulting by Ayanna Thompson.