Stage Notes: Hamlet: Hail To The Thief At The Barbican

Hamlet. It’s considered the greatest play in English literature. It possesses one of the language’s most quoted lines. And it’s spawned countless adaptations, interpretations and productions throughout its 400-or-so year history. What Shakespeare probably didn’t expect while penning (quilling?) his tale of the Danish prince, is that one day a dramatist would read the play after watching Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief in concert, and start to piece the two together. 

The result? Hamlet: Hail to the Thief, a new production of the Shakespearean masterpiece interweaved with Radiohead’s alternative rock record. We caught up with Christine Jones, the director and creator behind the show, to find out more. 

– Hamlet Hail to the Thief (Original Cast 2025). Paul Hilton as Claudius (centre of shot) and the cast of Hamlet Hail to the Thief. Photo by Manuel Harlan

What’s The Plot?

To quell any potential confusion, this production is still very much Hamlet,  just ‘distilled to its emotional core and haunted by Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief,’ says Christine. Every word spoken is Shakespeare’s and anything that was cut was expressed by music or movement instead. In sum: ‘The language is Shakespeare’s; the pulse is a live gig.’

Whilst it may seem like a rogue pairing, in Christine’s mind, ‘they illuminate each other.’ Both album and play, Christine explains, explore what happens when you are deluded by those in power that you end up deluding yourself. Both question how you can find humanity when living in a corrupt world. And both ask how you can find your moral compass in a world that tells you two and two make five.

For Christine, these themes feel as relevant now as ever. ‘A man takes a crown, the court applauds, and no one says a word about the power grab. That silence is the first betrayal Hamlet suffers, and it’s one we recognise.’ While this new production is not set in any specific time or place, both the play and the album, says Christine, ‘speak urgently to the convulsed world we find ourselves in. For me, working on this is one way to find the ground beneath me.’

With Radiohead’s Thom Yorke on the production (more on that below), he reworked the album to accompany the play as a live score. ‘Thom wanted the songs and the scenes to rub against each other,’ explains Christie, ‘so there are no needle-drops and no songs played start to finish. What you hear is the record broken apart and reassembled around the action.’

Hamlet Hail to the Thief (Original Cast 2025). Photo by Manuel Harlan.

What’s The Story Behind The Story?

When Christine saw Hail to the Thief at Madison Square Garden in 2003, she said it ‘changed [her] DNA’. Reading Hamlet shortly after, while designing a production of the play, she kept returning to the album and realised that the kinship between the two ‘felt uncanny’. ‘The two works kept haunting each other in my head for years.’

She was finally given the chance to pitch the concept to Radiohead’s Thom Yorke. ‘He thought it was madness – but seemed curious. His intrigue felt like permission.’ From there, she brought it to her creative partner Steven, with whom she’s previously made American Idiot, Let the Right One In, Harry Potter & The Cursed Child and SOCIAL! (thought this is the first piece they co-directed and adapted together). ‘And one Christmas, isolating with COVID, I put on my headphones, opened my laptop, and used my keyboard as a scalpel.’

With a script in-hand the first reading took place in 2022. By spring 2024, there was a workshop with actors and musicians. The play eventually premiered at Aviva Studios, home of Factory International, in Manchester in April and May 2025, before moving to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon that June. And now it’s coming to the Barbican. 

Blessed with a year between productions, Christine says that they’ve been able to ‘regroup and push the work further’, including alternating the music and editing the scripts to ‘further hone the emotional specificity of each scene’. 

Thom Yorke, Tom Knowles and Justin Levine in rehearsal for Hamlet Hail to the Thief (2025). Photo by Manuel Harlan

The Cast & Creatives

Inspired by the alchemy of a live Radiohead concert, the ‘musicians and actors are one body of players on the stage,’ explains Christine. ‘The band and our singers create the pulse and the drive that propels the entire production.’

Our Hamlet is played by Sam, who Steven had worked with on Ocean at the End of the Lane and who had been in the second cast of Harry Potter & The Cursed Child. ‘Sam moves between wit and devastation in a single breath, and he lets the choreography live in his body rather than relying solely on his dexterity with the text,’ says Christine of the casting. ‘Sam’s ability to be vulnerable and relentless impressed us immediately.’

With the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia pushed to the heart of the narrative, Christine wanted to ensure she gave the often mistreated Ophelia ‘a fully formed arc’. ‘Ami came in for an audition, and it was immediately clear that her keen intelligence and emotional precision would line up with our understanding of Ophelia.’

L-R) Paul Hilton (Claudius) and Claudia Harrison (Gertrude) in Hamlet Hail to the Thief (2025 production). Photo Manuel Harlan

The Venue

This latest production will see the adaptation transported to the Barbican. ‘Bringing this brutal play into the Barbican’s brutalist space seems fated,’ says Christine. ‘The building is all concrete, shadow and hidden walkways. It already feels like Elsinore.’ The set, meanwhile, is ‘something between a recording studio, a sound-testing chamber, and an interrogation room’. 

The Takeaway

What will linger as you leave the theatre? Christine hopes audiences will leave having felt something in their body before they’ve had time to think it. ‘I hope the words and the music, combined, leave people cracked open. […] The play opens with a question: “Who’s there?” I hope people leave still asking it — of the people who govern them, of the people they love, of themselves.’

Tickets

Hamlet Hail to the Thief runs at the Barbican Theatre, London, Oct 31–Jan 23; hamlethailtothethief.com