You’ve got to feel sorry for Shakespeare. A writer so gifted and celebrated that everyone ever since, especially directors, has felt inspired to put meaning into his words rather than letting the meaning of his words come out.
So, it’s with a mixture of feverish excitement and trepidation that one approaches this mixture of The Bard and Radiohead. Co-director Christine Jones says she felt the two drawn to each other as early as Hail To The Thief’s release in 2003 and it’s easy to see why: a knee-deep-in-bodies tragedy so extreme it borders on farce, paired with a body of musical work which so effectively channels the existential anxiety triggered by overloaded reality.
The excitement comes from feeling these two expressions are perfectly matched. Trepidation comes from the unsettling possibilities of an adaptation which lops about two hours off the text and a director who says “What can we show, what can we hear, instead of having to say it all?” Neil Simon’s The Goodbye Girl or The Comic Strip’s Strike raise their nightmarish heads.
Hamlet Hail to the Thief review
What the audience got was a bravura Grand Guignol a Go-Go Curate’s Egg which provides epic entertainment whilst taking so many liberties with his words that, if he were alive, Shakespeare might send the boys round.
What’s good about it?
The leads are excellent: Samuel Blenkin stands out, playing Hamlet as an Emo teenager galvanised by grief into an oikish trauma. Cheeky and ranting by turns, he nails the Yorick scene by dialling down the angst to capture a sense of mortal bewilderment.
The music works well, though, even as a fan, there’s probably too much of it. At times I couldn’t hear the words. If it’s the rock and roll opening with smoke, lights and Hamlet bellowing “YOU ARE NOT PAYING ATTENTION” into a loudhailer, it’s great. Other times, with bog-standard ambient pads and drones under dialogue that doesn’t need enhancing, it can be a distraction. The best use is in conveying Ophelia’s grief: The hey-nonny-nonnies are replaced by Thom Yorke’s elegaic melodies and Radiohead are brill, so what’s not to like?
Other highlights include an SFX projected ghost and dynamic staging (there are no dead spots at all), so there’s never a dull moment. The monochromic design and lights look fantastic but run the risk of unbalancing things by being just too impressive and dominant.
More Vic and Bob than Old Vic
And here’s the problem: though the show is an exciting must-see, I rarely felt completely emotionally engaged with it. This is a show where directors (there are four: Christine Jones and Steven Hoggett, plus associate Francesca Murray Fuentes and assistant Anna Berentzen), and choreographers (Jess Williams) intervene to such an extent that it becomes an amalgam of well-drilled set-pieces rather than a coherent whole.
My biggest problem was with the emphasis on dance which, I’ll admit, is my Achilles heel. However, several of the (many) routines forced me to laugh out loud involuntarily. I don’t think it was intentional. In particular, the climactic fight scene had me hooting. If it was meant to inject elements of farce and self-parody, then, fair play, it’s brilliant: after all, there’s scope for that in the text. However, given that it came after 90 minutes of Goth gloom, it was more Vic and Bob than Old Vic.
Some of the dance set-pieces brought back traumatic memories of BBC’s 1970s last-death-twitches-of-variety horror show Seaside Special. Lionel Blair might have thought it cliched. I’m willing to concede it might just be me, but then I noticed in the programme notes that the intention with the dance is to mimic the way Thom Yorke moves whilst performing.
This notion seems plain daft. Thom Yorke is as close to genius as makes no difference, but even amongst his most fervent admirers, you’d be hard pushed to find anyone who likes him because of how he dances. Plus, the notion that the poetry of language or entire scenes and sub-plots (all the bits with Fortinbras and Norwegians are cut), can be replaced by unison movements from the hip verges on directorial hubris.
Shakespeare meets Radiohead
Still, the audience loved it, the acting is top notch and the basic idea of using Radiohead to enhance Shakespeare is sound. Go and see it. It’ll get you talking, if only to see which way round the title should have been.
Hamlet Hail To The Thief is on at Aviva Studios, Manchester until 17 May. It transfers to the RST at Stratford in the summer.
