Thom Yorke is turning Radiohead’s album ‘Hail To The Thief’ into a modern version of Shakespeare’s iconic play ‘Hamlet’.
The 55-year-old frontman of the ‘Creep’ group is to “rework” the songs from the chart-topping 2003 LP and turn them into a “feverish new live experience, fusing theatre, music and movement.”
‘Hamlet Hail To The Thief’ will see 20 musicians and actors performing the album live during the play.
The musician has teamed up with Tony and Olivier Award-winning directors Steven Hoggett and Christine Jones on the production, and admitted it was an “intimidating challenge”.
Thom said: “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.”
The show will premiere at Manchester’s Aviva Studios on April 27, 2025, where it will run until May 18. It will then head to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford Upon Avon, England – the home of late literary legend William Shakespeare – from June 4 to 28.
Hoggett and Jones previously teamed up on the stage adaptation of Green Day’s ‘American Idiot’ and it was the latter’s idea to have the album and play “collide in a piece of theatre” after she came to realise the “uncanny reverberances” between the two pieces of art.
She said: “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.”
The album was Thom’s response to the election of the US president George W. Bush and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
He intertwined political discourse with children’s fairytales, with the title a play on the American president anthem ‘Hail to the Chief’.
News of Thom’s play comes after Radiohead recently reunited in the rehearsal room a few months ago.
The band – completed by brothers Colin and Jonny Greenwood, Philip Selway, and Ed O’Brien – haven’t toured together since 2018, and their last studio album was 2016’s ‘A Moon Shaped Pool’.