Fight the power - Review: Hamlet Hail to the Thief at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre

“TO thine own self be true.”

That’s all well and good for you to say Polonius my old mate, but what if you don’t know who thine own self is and can’t decide what’s true? What to do then?

Shakespeare’s most popular play is famously stuffed with 30 or more memorable bon mots but it’s the quote above that chimes most resonantly in this ambitious new production. While the starchy out-of-touch oldster counsels decency and abiding by the rules, cautioning against dereliction and defect of character, the players rapidly unravel, veering off the straight and narrow as we discover what happens if all that you really seem to be is a reactive wreck unable to countenance decisions and prone to squeezing all experience through the mouldy colander of your own fragile ego.

What if you are incapable of viewing everything that’s going on around you in any other manner than through the prism of your own personal paranoia? What if your sole psychological resort is prolonged fence-sitting and bet-hedging? And what if that leads to paralysis of action which, in turn, justifies itself by endlessly making you out to be the victim? In other words, what if your default setting is self-pity and you make everything all about you?

Sound familiar? Of course, it does. But we’re not just talking about the procrastinating prince here. Say hello to Thom Yorke. The Radiohead singer who repurposed the band’s Hail To The Thief LP to facilitate this production could be twinned with the Denmark ditherer, his resume stuffed with an uncannily similar impotent mewling rage.

Hail To The Thief was released 22 years ago, in June 2003. It was Radiohead’s sixth LP and is now voted in online fan polls the band’s fifth most popular out of a total of nine. It came out in the immediate aftermath the election of US President George W Bush and his “war on terror”, the album’s title a riff on Hail To The Chief, an unofficial presidential anthem. How it came to be paired with the Bard is down to co-director Christine Jones who intuited that the play and the record share a remarkable resemblance in tenor and tone. She discovered a while ago that they both express a quaking, imprecise reaction to world events channelled through the fictional protagonist and the singer’s shared inability to process their antipathy in any meaningful or useful way.

Attempting to avoid being seen to take sides, Yorke said at the time of the Thief album release: “I desperately tried not to write anything political, anything expressing the deep, profound terror I’m living with day to day. But it’s just f---ing there, and eventually you have to give it up and let it happen.”

We’re not talking American Idiot here. No one’s head was put on the block. But there it is laid bare. The Hamlet complex, making it all about him.

The timing of Hamlet Hail To The Thief is also significant in that Yorke has just released a statement attempting to clarify his and Radiohead’s position regarding the Israel/Gaza conflict. The band have been criticised for playing gigs in Israel while others have cancelled in protest at the long-term ongoing slaughter, a situation which culminated in Yorke angrily reacting to a heckler in Australia during one of his solo shows 20 months ago.

It’s taken him until now to fashion a statement about where he stood after that stand-off – very Hamlet-like in not immediately taking the bull by the horns – and when he finally decided to publish his piece, here, in part, is what he had to say:

“Some guy shouting at me from the dark … when I was picking up a guitar to sing the final song alone in front of 9,000 people in Melbourne didn’t really seem like the best moment to discuss the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza.

“Afterwards I remained in shock that my supposed silence was somehow being taken as complicity, and I struggled to find an adequate way to respond to this and to carry on with the rest of the shows on the tour.

“That silence, my attempt to show respect for all those who are suffering and those who have died, and to not trivialise it in a few words, has allowed other opportunistic groups to use intimidation and defamation to fill in the blanks, and I regret giving them this chance. This has had a heavy toll on my mental health.”

Again, all about him. There’s some blame aimed at us further on too for being dumb enough not to accept that his group’s output down the years must surely make it impossible for us to doubt his persuasions.

For those who wish to pursue this further, there’s a monumental takedown of Yorke’s full statement here: ‘Genospectra Institute Statement on Thom Yorke’s Public Response to the Genocide in Gaza’ (substack.com).

Be warned though – it’s very long and it pulls no punches. Nor do the comments that have piled up beneath his posting online. Here’s a sample: “60-year-old man baby cries because people asked him to take a stance against baby murder.”

When Hamlet Hail To The Thief was first announced, there was some question as to why the match was made. But bearing all this stuff in mind, it’s not so very hard to see the connection. The prince and Yorke are like peas in a pod. Yorke even embraced the project as a chance to rework the songs as he felt the original recording was rushed in pursuit of creating something raw and in the moment – another trait against his nature.

Anyway, does it work? It does, sometimes stunningly. The music achieves just what it’s supposed to do – aurally dictating the mood we’re to assume at any particular juncture; excessive and loud for violence, squeaky when things get weird. Its deployment is most reminiscent of the way live orchestras used to accompany the screenings of silent films in movie palaces, non-too-subtly underscoring the emotions on show. And indeed, as it so happens, this coming October a print of FW Murnau’s 1922 horror classic Nosferatu will be doing the rounds of UK cinemas sound-tracked by Radiohead’s Kid A and Amnesiac albums from the early 2000s under the umbrella of Silents Synched.

In the RSC production, the sounds are provided by an admirably dynamic rock quintet visible through glass at the back of the stage as if in a recording studio, and vocalists Megan Hill and Ed Begley who occasionally appear on either end of a balustrade to deliver uncannily accurate impressions of Yorke’s trademark anguished yelp.

It’s all a bit of a barrage at times but is viscerally effective when slabs of the Thief thunder in to score the fight finale rendering it more brutal than most. Although it’s not by any means a musical per-se, the Ham’head match is most movingly served on the couple of occasions when the actors themselves sing the songs. Ami Tredrea’s fragment of Sail To The Moon as Ophelia surrenders towards suicide is a moment of beautiful melancholy and Samuel Blenkin does Scatterbrain chillingly as Hamlet returning from the voyage where it was planned he’d be assassinated.

At other times, though, the musical accompaniment and its attendant choreographed sequences serve to distract from as much enhance the play and it becomes less an emotional engagement with the audience than a spectacle to be observed and admired. The dance stuff works fitfully – the balletic physical entanglement between Hamlet and Ophelia to the ’Head’s Where You End And I Begin near the outset is thrilling, suggesting there may have been a lot more passing between them than the mere exchange of love tokens. The players’ dumb show mime of the King’s poisoning, on the other hand, is just daft.

Other perfectly performed movement sequences spring up as and when to no real purpose. The play has been cauterised from three-and-something hours to 100 minutes with no intermission which would lead you to think that it bombs along at a clip but it actually begins to drag a bit towards its conclusion, cluttered up with much writhing and symbolic intertwining and weighted down by the monotony of noise and the regimented starkness of the way it’s been set within very same-y variations on the theme of black.

The thing is, impressive as is this full-on ballistic presentation, it brought to mind the contentious over-egging of The Beatles’ Let It Be album, in particular the orchestration added by producer Phil Spector to The Long And Winding Road which so infuriated Paul McCartney that he insisted it be released again later, stripped of all the flannel.

I wonder what this production would be like if it were rendered ’Headless. I think it could stand on its own two feet. It might be fun to see it naked sometime because there’s some fresh insights and interpretations knocking about within its diminished frame. For one, Hamlet addresses his “To be or not to be” bit to Ophelia which, rather than the usual bout of introverted navel gazing, raises the possibility that Hamlet’s tough-to-explain acceleration from love to spitting hatred for his intended might actually be an act of charity, the prince putting on the cruelty to be kind in trying to save his fiancée from the ensuing carnage.

What it certainly does is bring Ophelia much more into consideration, which is welcome considering the RSC’s last production of Hamlet, the stunning one staged aboard a ship, pretty much marginalised her in a bit part. Here she is the image and equal of the prince, mirroring his despair at losing her father which is cleverly emphasised by having her repeat the “To be or not to be” business before drowning.

Directors Jones and Steven Hoggett are smartly adept at shorthanding sequences that go on a bit in the original, a smirk here or a shuffle there indicating what Shakespeare spent whole stanzas to convey. And this approach also suggests there might be a solution to another question which has troubled audiences down through the ages. Namely, does Gertrude, the Queen, know that her new husband murdered her regal ex? The way Claudia Harrison plays it the answer is no, and in coming to realisation, tutored by the prince her son, she flinches away from the fratricide in gathering disgust. Not sure why she drops the f-bomb though.

Another consequence of the lopping of the lines is that, in order that those in the audience not cognisant of the plot don’t lose their way, the cast have to emphasise the ham in Hamlet. The upshot of this is that James Cooney’s Rosencrantz and Felipe Pacheco’s Guildenstern are rendered as blithering idiots and Brandon Grace plays Laertes ultra-shouty just so we understand that he is the polar opposite of the vacillating prince, all instinct and action. Where upping the character ante works really well, though, is in making Claudius a proper arch villain. Paul Hilton plays him handsomely, suave and steely-eyed, a louche chain-smoking chancer so sneakily seductive that he almost steals the show. You know how the word EVIL lurks inside ELVIs? Well, there you have him.

He’s also the ghost, pre-recorded and enlarged via video, half-human, half-static and not half as scary as it thinks it is.

OK, so we need to talk about Hamlet himself. Upon our first encounter Blenkin looks more Bilbo Baggins than heir-to-the-throne and appears more petulant than perturbed. As the plot thickens he grows on us, his sarcasm raising the odd chortle though we’ve seen ’em more enraged and deranged.

The sole character in the play who isn’t so wracked with self-obsession that they can actually sincerely offer friendship, fulfil duty, provide succour and be trusted, is Horatio, nicely played with sympathetic concern by Alby Baldwin. Fortinbras has been entirely excised from this production. He’s not much missed. It’s entirely fitting that it’s Horatio whose soliloquy replaces his at the end of the play. It’s a small note of hope for some goodness in the human race against all the mounting odds symbolised by the empty suit jackets descending on hangers from the ceiling eager to be filled by the next power-hungry mob. What is it The Who said in Won’t Get Fooled Again? “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

The triumph of this production, judging by the unusually un-fusty attendees at press night, lies in the possibility that it may well attract a fresh audience unfamiliar with the theatre and keen to be impressed. In which case, job extremely well done.