Hamlet Hail to the Thief, RSC, Stratford review - Radiohead mark the Bard's card

The safe transfer of power in post-war Western democracies was once a given. The homely Pickfords Removals van outside Number Ten, a crestfallen now ex-PM and family mooching about, for once trying not to be on camera, it's a tabloid front page cliché. Or the pomp and circumstance on Capitol Hill, cold, crowded and celebratory, a rebuke to the slab-faced gerontocracy, back yet again to survey Moscow’s Red Square parade.

Shakespeare knew that such displays concealed dramas both political and personal and poured that knowledge (and a whole lot more) into Hamlet, state and court disintegrating under a poisoned succession. Four hundred years later, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke knew it too, externalising his anxiety about the Bush-Gore "hanging chads" election into the album Hail To The Thief. Twenty-five years on again, we all know it after the events of January 6, 2021 and the gnawing worry about what happens come 2028 – and not just in Washington DC. Yorke may not have wanted his album to be political, but he, like all artists, don’t get to choose.
It’s a monochrome world in a cathedral-like theatre (not unlike that created by Joel Coen for his underrated film The Tragedy of Macbeth), austere, unanchored by time or place. Co-directors, Christine Jones and Steven Hoggett, burst this misty bubble of calm before the storm with shattering music, guitars, keys and drums animating the cast to break like the waves of a roiling sea, any sense of comforting stability gone, never to return. With a king/father dead, suspected murdered, and his mother wed to his uncle/usurper, Hamlet’s mind pitches, rolls and yaws – the centre cannot hold.

It’s a solecism to remark that this is a Hamlet like no other – by definition all Hamlets are – but, shorn to 100 minutes by excising much of the text, leaving us with something of a greatest hits of speeches, the show (the mot juste in this case) breaks over us at an unrelenting pace. It’s not diminished though, not if you’re familiar with the story, because though it's not as beautiful as Shakespeare’s dissection of the soul, you feel it in the pit of your stomach. You wouldn’t want every Hamlet like this, but you wonder if you could ask the team to have a little look at King Lear if they can find a spare few years…

Balancing off the importing of politics (what can you do with that title after all?) the doomed love affair between Hamlet and Ophelia is given more prominence. Ami Tredrea is no teenage ingénue, treating her brother Laertes (Brandon Grace) with a “Been there; done that” contempt when he warns her of Hamlet’s intentions. Samuel Blenkin (pictured above with Alby Baldwin), a bit emo as the bitter prince, is charming and cruel by turn, needing little convincing as to the murderous course of action he must follow. There’s not much vacillation or doubt to slow things down, no standing over a praying King Claudius (an heroically odious Paul Hilton) dagger in hand. The music is driving him forward, his head spinning like the CD on which it first appeared, insisting on his destiny. 

Some nuance is lost, inevitably. There are cuts, but few additions (though a drop-dead perfect expletive from Claudia Harrison’s Gertrude hit the spot) which puts extra weight on the text that survives. Not all the line readings worked, the poetry washed away with the pace, the opportunity to consider what a character revealed about themselves truncated, because look – Polonius (Tom Peters) is doing “Neither a borrower nor a lender be”. 

The band, so present in our ears, are less present in our eyes, locked into individual sound booths, part of the set rather than the cast. Once I got an image of Spinal Tap in their pods out of my mind, it worked, and it’s hard to imagine Radiohead themselves delivering the music with more commitment and skill. Vocalists, Ed Begley and Megan Hill, a Greek Chorus, would also appear from time to time at high windows, like intrusive thoughts. They caught the soaring falsettos and ghostly otherworldliness of the source material just so.

Not everything works, but there’s an argument that says that if everything did, they weren’t trying hard enough – but plenty does. Who’s it for? Well, you would have to be the most diehard of traditionalists not to recognise the vivid colours the music brings to the production, but it might be best of all for GCSE kids and for those who had been put off Shakey at school (and we are legion) who invest ten minutes in reading a plot and character summary and go in with no preconceptions beyond that. They'll be blown away!

Oh, and also the Trump cheerleaders in our media, who might just understand that undermining state institutions and processes in the furtherance of accumulating and preserving power makes everyone mad, with the just poor bloody infantry left standing to pick up the pieces.  

• Hamlet Hail to the Thief is a co-production between the Royal Shakespeare Company and Factory International at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre until 28 June
• More theatre reviews on theartsdesk