I’ve loved the idea of Hamlet as a ghost story ever since the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s whacky comedy versions got me hooked on Shakespeare in the ’90s. At the Barbican, it looks and sounds like one. In Hamlet Hail to the Thief, directors Christine Jones and Steven Hoggett fuse Shakespeare’s tragedy with Radiohead’s 2003 album Hail to the Thief, which Thom Yorke has pulled apart and reorchestrated for a live band. I didn’t know the album particularly well going in, but by the time I listened to it properly afterwards, I could see whole bits of the show again.

Before anyone speaks, there are empty black coats hanging above the stage, looking like dementors from ‘those wizard books’, smoke creeping and spinning all around them, and something flickering across the back wall. The first preview was on Halloween, so the creative team clearly agree that ultimately it’s a spooky ghost story. The set, by AMP Scenography featuring Sadra Tehrani, looks like a recording studio you wouldn’t want to be left alone in at night, with Marshall amps on the floor and the band behind windows. When the ghost appears, Will Duke gives us an eye, the suggestion of a face, and then an image so vast it seems to take up the whole wall. Just as you think you’ve got a proper look, it slips out of focus again. Between Duke’s projections, Lisa Duncan’s black costumes, and Jessica Hung Han Yun’s shafts of light through the smoke, you could freeze the show just about anywhere and have yourself a spooky rock album cover.

Samuel Blenkin is extraordinary in the lead role. You feel his Hamlet’s grief straight away, watching his mother and uncle get on with being newlyweds while he’s still trying to get his head around his father’s death. He gives a Hamlet you can practically see coming apart at the seams. In one scene he seems to grow paler and sicker just standing there talking. His ‘To be or not to be’ is so moving and thick with emotion, whilst the dispassionate way he turns on Ophelia is heartbreakingly real. Blenkin lets you feel the full weight of his grief and anger in his every movement and word.

Paul Hilton plays both the ghost of the father Hamlet longs to see and the uncle he can barely stand to look at. As Claudius, he’s remarkably at ease. He and Claudia Harrison’s Gertrude look like they’re having a wonderful time dancing together. Despite his complete lack of remorse for the murder of his brother, I was surprised to see moments when I believed Claudius genuinely cared about Hamlet. I liked that Hilton let that concern for him sit alongside everything Claudius had done. He seems so sure of his place in this family that you can almost see the exact moment it dawns on him, watching the play Hamlet has put on, that he might not have got away with it after all. The light turns red, Hilton starts to twitch and then yell, and Blenkin delivers ‘I’ll take the ghost’s word for a thousand pound’ almost to himself. After all that effort to find out the truth, he sounds exhausted by it.

Christine Jones writes in the programme that she first heard the parallels with Hail to the Thief while designing Hamlet in 2004, a few months after seeing Radiohead at Madison Square Garden. She and co-director Hoggett get the play down to an hour and 40 minutes, and what I loved was how much they trusted the band and the actors’ bodies to bring so much of the emotion and drama. Sometimes that takes a minute to get used to. I could barely make out the lyrics being sung through a megaphone at the start, even though the sound of it was powerful.

Choreographer Jess Williams says much of the movement was devised without Yorke’s orchestrations playing, which surprised me because the two feel so right together. Hamlet, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern have a conversation while leaning and stepping in unison, as if the floor were the deck of a boat. They’re still talking when one of them tips so far he rolls and comes straight back up on his feet. It made me laugh, but there’s something unsettling about watching three people carry on as though everything’s perfectly normal when they can barely stay upright.

Ami Tredrea’s Ophelia has a much gentler, more playful way of moving with Hamlet early on. There’s real affection between her and Blenkin, which makes it hurt that much more when he pushes her away. What stayed with me about Tredrea was how fiercely she felt everything, from that first flush of affection to the anguish of losing her father. Her death is one of the moments where the whole production comes together. She drops into a coffin-shaped opening in the stage and there’s a sudden splash of light. When she reappears in white, after an evening spent looking at people dressed almost entirely in black, she is a pure symbol of Ophelia’s innocence and the tragedy of her demise.

Throughout the final scene, balls of projected light pour down the wall, gathering and overflowing like hail on top of those studio windows. It’s another stunning projection effect and reinforces the impression of Hamlet’s whole world falling down. Alby Baldwin plays Horatio’s love for Hamlet so purely and the bond between the two is fierce and real. When Baldwin finally turns to speak directly to us, after Hamlet has died in their arms, you truly feel what it costs Horatio to be the one left to tell the story. That final speech gave me goosebumps.

Hamlet Hail to the Thief barely lets you catch your breath, whilst looking and sounding incredible. If you love seeing Shakespeare done differently, or you’re a massive Radiohead fan, you’ll go nuts for this. And the best part is that you can put the album on and relive the roller-coaster time after time.

★★★★

Hamlet Hail to the Thief is at the Barbican Theatre until 23 January 2027.

Book your tickets at barbican.org.uk.

Words by Nick Barr

Production photography by Manuel Harlan