There's method in the madness!

As Thom Yorke's unique take on Shakespeare hits the stage, the Radiohead icon and the show's creative team tell KATE WYVER how they tackled the project

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THOM Yorke thought it was madness. The Radiohead frontman says: “I saw Shakespeare's work as something totemic, so applying our music to it initially seemed a kind of sacrilege.”

Then he adjusts his thick black glasses and lets slip a small grin: “But I’m always up for a little bit of sacrilege.”

Back in October 2003, director and designer Christine Jones was at Madison Square Garden as Radiohead played tracks from their Grammy Award-winning album Hail to the Thief.

The heady, propulsive songs were still circling her mind a few months later as she was designing a production of Hamlet. The album had not been intentionally influenced by the play, but uncanny similarities between them began to appear.

“I was haunted by this idea of them being in dialogue with each other,” she says, describing the echoes between them like ghost sightings. “Both look at the complexity of what it is to be human, to delude yourself and to be deluded by your government. To find your moral compass within the world.”

She started to imagine a production where their dark, teetering interrogations of distrust and paranoia, lined by glimmers of tenderness, could collide.