Hamlet Hail to the Thief review - ​Thrilling collision of Bard and Radiohead on Stratford stage

It’s one of those ideas that seems weird until it seems obvious. Why stick a camera on a mobile phone? Why put wheels on a suitcase? Why combine Hamlet with Hail to the Thief, a Radiohead album?

Of course, after a bit of time, you wonder why no one has done it before. In the case of this play and this music, there are clear similarities, less in text than in texture. There is angst and rage and fury, and spectral beauty; there is tangled density and pristine clarity; there is certainty and uncertainty, a constant tension between the person and their place in the world. There is a kind of open-hearted hostility and snarling vulnerability. There is violence and sensuality, and there is colossal abrasive noise and there is silence.

The album came out in 2003 and was recorded quickly. Maybe too quickly: Thom Yorke, the band’s frontman and the orchestrator for this production, calls it "the record that got away”. He was keen to revisit it. Its music is presented here in fractured and fragmented form, sometimes between scenes, sometimes underscoring the action, sometimes sung by the actors, but mostly by two wondrous singers, Ed Begley and Megan Hill, who trace the depths and heights of Yorke’s voice. There is no attempt to sanitise Radiohead for the RSC: at times, the music is surely as loud as anything heard at the old theatre, seeming at times to shake its foundations. It is played live by musicians who don’t let their technical excellence get in the way of their emotional expressiveness.

This Hail to the Thief may not be quite the Hail to the Thief that some Radiohead fans may want: if you’re used to these songs in full, their curtailment may prove frustrating. For Shakespeare fans, the same may apply to this Hamlet, cut here to one hour and forty minutes. All the main plot points are present, and Shakespeare’s language is largely intact. The premise remains unbeatable: what would you do if your father died, you believed your uncle killed him, and your uncle married your mother? But some of the feel of the thing is inevitably lost, most notably the sense of Hamlet’s cowardice and prevarication, the crucial distance between the fully-formed man he wants to be and the student he is. This Hamlet is undoubtedly a man of action, entirely self-possessed, and as a result is perhaps less truly Hamlet.

It would therefore be easy to criticise Hamlet Hail to the Thief for being neither Hail to the Thief nor Hamlet. But what emerges is something of great value in itself, a thrilling and propulsive work of theatrical art. The set resembles a recording studio, the musicians in their booths, and the production is suffused with tension and possibility. Samuel Blenkin is elfin yet steely as Hamlet; meanwhile, Ami Tredrea's unusually masterful Ophelia is a revelation, entirely justifying the invention of a scene in which her suicide follows her own deliberations on being and not being. The look is overwhelmingly and modishly monochrome, but it allows for sharp lighting, bringing out the angular style of the movement and choreography. The whole production has sparks coming off it, and there are even genuine laughs.

The vast team behind this – most notably Steven Hoggart and his co-director Christine Jones, who came up with the idea in 2004 while designing a production of Hamlet while listening to the album – deserves credit for trying something new and executing it so expertly, as does the RSC for staging it. Hail to the Thief and Hamlet: imaginative, inevitable.

Until June 28​. Call 01789 331111 or visit rsc.org.uk to book.