Rock band Radiohead rework Shakespeare’s Hamlet for new stage production
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
Thom Yorke's lyrics for Hail To The Thief (2003) were originally a response to the election of Mr George W. Bush as US president and his “war on terror”.
PHOTO: MICHAEL AVEDON
LONDON – English playwright William Shakespeare will meet Radiohead in a new stage production of Hamlet due to premiere in 2025, set to a reworked version of the English rock band’s album Hail To The Thief (2003).
Frontman Thom Yorke’s lyrics for the 2003 album were originally a response to the election of Mr George W. Bush as United States president and his “war on terror” that followed the Sept 11 attacks in 2001.
The singer-songwriter is deconstructing and reworking the album for the production, which will be performed by a cast of some 20 musicians and actors. The 55-year-old is set to play a solo show for the first time in Singapore at The Star Theatre on Nov 5.
Yorke, who is working with Tony- and Olivier award-winning designer Christine Jones and director Steven Hoggett, said in a statement it was an “interesting and intimidating challenge”.
“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,” said Jones, who conceptualised the idea.
The designer said she had been struck by the “uncanny reverberances between the (Hamlet) text and the album”.
“We’ve found that the play haunts the album, and the album haunts the play,” she said.
Radiohead, comprising former school friends Yorke, brothers Jonny and Colin Greenwood, and Ed O’Brien and Philip Selway, formed in Oxfordshire, southern England, in 1985.
The alternative rockers had a string of best-selling singles in the 1990s and early 2000s, including Creep (1992), Paranoid Android (1997) and No Surprises (1998).
Creep was their debut single and remains their most successful, with over one billion views on YouTube. By 2011, they had sold more than 30 million albums worldwide.
The band, which have also campaigned passionately for environmental causes, were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019.
Hamlet Hail To The Thief will stage its world premiere in Manchester, north-western England, in April 2025 before transferring to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon in June. AFP
