In mid-April 2003, I stood in Fifty Acre Wood, five miles west of Bristol, watching Thom Yorke stomp, slowly, repeatedly through the undergrowth. Under the watchful eye of filmmaker Chris Hopewell, he was shooting scenes for the Jan Švankmajer-inspired, stop-motion video for ‘There, There’, the first single from Radiohead’s upcoming sixth album.
Hail to the Thief was the follow-up to the game-changing, sound-shifting, back-to-back Kid A and Amnesiac, the lengthy, intense, making of which had nearly ripped the band apart. The new record, in contrast, had been recorded with energy, directness, speed. So much so that here was the frontman making – of all things – a pop video.
‘I’m trying to persuade the record company to shell out on lots of singles and all that stuff,’ Yorke told me when we talked in Oxford that month. Hail to the Thief, he insisted, ‘is a pop record. It’s really direct. It has this energy to it. I’d love to know that it was on the radio. Just ’cause that’s where my head's at. I don’t want to be on the top shelves at the back. ’Cause I’m into it too much. I like it. It is,’ he repeated, just for clarity, ‘pop music.’
In mid-October 2026, I stood in the rehearsal space of the National Youth Theatre in north London, watching Yorke tell a bunch of musicians – not Radiohead – that he wanted to hear again the bass being played in a new version of Hail to the Thief track ‘Where I End and You Begin’. Around him and the band, who were arranged in and under scaffolding-type boxes, a troupe of actors were working out moves under the watchful eye of choreographer Steven Hoggett and stage director Christine Jones.
This was the end of the third week of off-site rehearsals, one more to go, on Hamlet Hail to the Thief. This kinetic, musical, theatrical marriage – you might say mash-up – of Radiohead’s 2003 album and Shakespeare’s play premiered in 2025, with brief runs in Manchester’s Aviva Studios and at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon. Now, it was preparing to open at the Barbican in London for a three-month run.
I watched the company, led by returning actor Samuel Blenkin (Alien: Earth) as Hamlet, work on scene 12. Titled State of Play, the script notes describe it as a ‘physical sequence replac[ing] dialogue. The actors and the scenes it replaces [include] Hamlet witnessing Gertrude and Claudius sexually entangled, creating an emotional arc going from “the play’s the thing” and “to be or not to be.”’
The scene is scored by Yorke’s reworking of ‘Where I End and You Begin’, the sixth track on Hail to the Thief, with a male and female vocalist in the corner repeating the climactic lyrics: ‘There’ll be no more lies, I will eat you alive…’
Even in rehearsals, cast and crew and band in mufti, the effect is utterly thrilling.
This is one of the 27 scenes that the play has been edited down to for a running time of between 90 and 100 minutes, the action soundtracked by Yorke’s jigsawed versions of the album’s 14 songs. As the musician, ever the iconoclast, describes Hamlet Hail to the Thief: ‘It moves at a fast pace. It's not four hours. It doesn't have long soliloquies where you can go to sleep, wake up again, you’ve still not missed anything...’ He caught himself and smiled. ‘Um...Did I say that?’
He did indeed, and a lot more besides, when, over lunchbreak, I sat down with Yorke, Jones and Hoggett to discuss the third and biggest outing for their innovative show.
Wallpaper*: Thom, how did constructing this show last year, and now again this year, compare to making an album?
Thom Yorke: When you put a record together, you hope that one piece may move one way. But when it moves in another direction for another track, they're complementing each other. So there's an accumulated emotional effect that happens. Which is the bit that, when we set about this, I hadn't thought about.
There are all these people involved, and everything's happening all around the stage. And some nights the first thing that Hamlet does is get a laugh. And you're like: ‘What, already?’ That kind of thing. That affects how you see the music, too.
But there's also a very selfish element to it. The arc of whatever this is has to satisfy something in my musical head, too.
W*: Christine, what are the origins of this idea?
Christine Jones: I saw the Hail to the Thief tour in 2003 at Madison Square Garden. It was the first time I'd seen Radiohead live, and I was blown away. It changed my DNA structure. Not long after, I was working on a production of Hamlet as a designer. I often write the text out, and I listen to music. I was fresh off this concert, so I was listening to the record, and I literally started writing lyrics along with words from the text. That planted a seed.
Over time, that seed kept growing, and I kept thinking about it. And it was a number of years later when I had the opportunity to ask Thom if it was something that he'd consider collaborating on. And that took a bit of time.
TY: You got a predictable answer!
W*: …which, of course, was ‘no’. But you did say yes, Thom…
TY: Eventually, yeah. It took about five years to get over the presumption of putting those two things together. This is not my world. So I didn't realise, as much as anything, that there's no sense of having to pay homage. This version of Hamlet is not a definitive version of Hamlet.
Then the more you read about these things, the more you realise that nothing is a definitive version of anything. There's no definitive version of a Pinter play. So I had to jump over a few humps in my head before eventually we started properly talking about it.
CJ: In this case, the synergy and uncanny resonances between the play and the music are a particularly fertile collision. But it's us all coming together, and bringing the work that Steven and I have done together for years, bringing experiences of being at Radiohead concerts, of being at other concerts, and seeing how everything impacts each other.
Steven Hoggett: There was something about seeing [Yorke and bandmate Jonny Greenwood’s side-project] The Smile the year before last in New York. The gig was really cheeky. And we were talking for a second about [doing this show] in the round [like The Smile shows] after seeing that gig. But it was the tonality of this cheeky band, that was still as complex and as sophisticated, but were taking our ears on a journey.
It was a big shift watching that gig. We've got 27 scenes. So it's like a greatest hits as a feel and a listening event. And I guess it is akin to – sorry to make the analogy like this, Thom – a Radiohead gig to The Smile. Somebody called The Smile the cheeky younger cousin of Radiohead, and this feels like the cheeky younger cousin of the Hamlet play. It's got an errant nature to it, but it's fleet-footed and it keeps turning itself over.
W*: When you were editing the text, Christine, to get to this ‘greatest hits’ idea of Hamlet, were you trying to shape the remaining text to individual songs? Or was it more freeform than that?
CJ: The first thing I did was, I edited the script. I took a pass at what I call creating a spine-line and pulling out all the pieces that felt the most resonant. Then once I had that, as an exercise, I did say: ‘OK, what if I start at the beginning of the album and I go to the end?’
And that first time through, there was a sense of how different characters connected to different songs thematically. The court being established was [album opening track] ‘2 + 2 = 5’. The ghost being established was ‘The Gloaming’. Ophelia being connected to ‘Sail to the Moon’. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were ‘Where I End and You Begin’.
We ended up changing a lot of that… Although, as we realised the other day, we do start at the beginning of the album and end at the end of the album. We've made a lot of adjustments and flipped scenes around, flipped songs around, but there is that container.
W*: How has it been for your dancers, Steven –
SH: Oh, I love that you call them dancers. They will love you for that!
W*: – getting their heads around the tricksy rhythms of these songs?
SH: There was that big question, and I do enjoy when somebody does this – a friend of mine, when we said we were doing this, went: ‘Who needs that? Dancing to Radiohead...?’ I was like: ‘Yeah, I understand that. I don't think I want to see that either.’
W*: So to be clear…
SH: We don't dance to Radiohead. They actually do a courtly restoration piece of choreography at one point. It's mocked, it's heightened. But the rest of it, we make a real distinction in the room, which is why I made the comment about you calling them dancers. Because they don't dance, they move. The minute you say to somebody ‘dance’, people do weird shit. Whereas if they're moving and it's intrinsic and has a qualitative nature [to] what they're thinking or saying, you can make tonnes of material. So the d-word is not one we drop in the room. Because it inhibits.
W*: When we met in 2003, Thom, with the paint still wet on Hail to the Thief, you insisted it was a pop record. Do you stand by that assessment?
TY: [winces and squirms] I don't f*cking know, do I? Clearly, I've been thinking I've been making pop since we started! So I should probably give up. You laugh, but I'm serious.
W*: The other thing you said was that you'd taken ‘a long six months off’. And then someone close to you said: ‘Why don't you just do a record where you let it happen? Just go in and do it, no agenda, nothing.’ And for you, ‘that made things click’. That energy and that drive – are you seeing a parallel energy and drive here?
TY: We were all [in the band] in agreement with that [idea]. Because we'd been through this [experience]. Kid A was a very long, tortuous process. It was really fun, but we did go a bit f*cking mad. I mean, you build your own studio, and you give yourself no deadline at all... And then after about eight or nine months, [producer] Nigel [Godrich] called it and said: ‘We have to stop. We have to finish whatever the f*ck this is.’
So, yeah, [with Hail to the Thief] we were going the other way. And because we were going the other way, there was no time to go over things. Which, as soon as it came out, I was like: ‘Oh, I kind of wish we had...’ But it's one of those weird things, you lurch from one extreme to the other.
W*: But does that directness now help with this production? Because there's a propulsion to this music, these songs.
TY: I mean, yessss... In the sense that: a lot of the songs lend themselves to be reinterpreted quite easily. And put on different instruments, and slowed down, sped up. I was actually really surprised.
My first test of the whole thing was, they did a read through in New York and they sent me it. I tentatively stumbled through it with acoustic guitar or piano or very basic [instrumentation] underneath to try see what it feels like. To have that music under the words. And I realised quickly: oh, OK, there's a lot of licence here. I can take Jonny's riff on ‘2 + 2’, I can turn it into [something] and it can go anywhere it wants. As soon as it's on the synthesiser, it's almost unrecognisable.
W*: Can you tell us, Christine, about the visuals you've designed for this show?
CJ: I worked with Brett Banakis and Sadra Tehrani as part of a collective. When we first started thinking about this, we were thinking about operating theatres. And recording studios and sound stages. I love recording studio porn. I could just look at recording studios all day long.
Even in the beginning, we weren't sure if the band and the actors were in the same space. [But] we wanted them all to feel like they were definitely in the present together, making this happen. Then over time we started looking at isolation chambers, solitary confinement chambers.
Then we found this piece of research from Nasa, on a resonant acoustic chamber. It's this space where they test the effect of sound waves on objects. They'll put a rocket ship in this room and blast it with sound. That felt like the perfect metaphor for what this world does to Hamlet. He's put into this space, and it is a kind of cruel experiment where the play and the music keep betraying him. And disorienting him. And lying to him. This experiment in how much can one soul take before it completely breaks. So the space is informed by sound.
SH: We liked the idea how speakers can sometimes look really scary. They're big, with those cones. Of course they're sexy and they're black and we see them in gigs and we love them. But actually, there’s the propensity of them to become something to weaponise.
W*: What did you learn from Manchester and Stratford in terms of what worked and what didn’t?
CJ: One of the things that was interesting is that in Manchester, it was a warehouse space. The seating was all made out of bleachers, and it felt like a gig.
TY: Metallic bleachers. When people came into the show, they'd have had three pints thinking it was going to be a gig. Then realised it wasn't. Then they ran for the toilet during the soliloquy. [Which meant the seats going] bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang...
CJ: We've been in this balance between it's a gig and it's a play. When we went to the Royal Shakespeare Company, we were in a thrust theatre space. There it felt like a play. Now at the Barbican, we get to land in a sweet spot – the brutalist architecture, the shape of that [room]… We're finding that it can exist in some space in between. Hopefully the Barbican lets us be both a play and a gig instead of one or the other.
TY: It's crazy intimate in there. F*cking bonkers.
W*: Finally, Thom: did your reconstruction or reimagining of these songs inform the performance of any of the Hail to the Thief songs on the Radiohead tour last year?
TY: [splutters] Doing this? Oh, no! What, I come to the Radiohead gig and say, ‘hey, the other band, they kind of nailed this one...’? No, no. That was not happening!
Hamlet Hail to the Thief runs from 31 October 2026 to 23 January 2027 at Barbican Theatre, Silk Street, London, EC27 8DS. Ticket information here