“Everything started to become possible”

As new production Hamlet Hail to the Thief combines Radiohead's 2003 album with the classic Shakespeare play, its co-creators Thom Yorke and directors Christine Jones and Steven Hoggett reflect on the project’s genesis

- KATE WYVER

THOM YORKE THOUGHT it was madness. “I never associated music favourably with Shakespeare,” says the Radiohead frontman. “I saw his work as something totemic, so applying our music to it initially seemed a kind of sacrilege.” He adjusts his thick black glasses and lets slip a small grin. “But I'm always up for a little bit of sacrilege.”

In October 2003, director and designer Christine Jones was at Madison Square Garden as Radiohead played tracks from their soon-to-be Grammy Award-winning album Hail to the Thief. The heady, propulsive songs were still circling her mind a few months later when she was designing a production of Hamlet. Although the album had not been intentionally influenced by the 400-year-old play, uncanny similarities between them began to appear to Jones.

“I was haunted by this idea of them being in dialogue with each other,” she says, describing the echoes between them as being 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.

When Jones suggested the idea of combining Hamlet with Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief to Yorke, he couldn't stop thinking about it. “That’s how I judge things a lot,” says Yorke, tapping his forehead, “if they stick in here.” He read that Shakespeare would commission leading composers of the day to write songs and he would collaborate with them. “They weren’t just ditties,” Yorke says, “they were structural parts of his work.” Perhaps the suggestion for this cross-form production was not so radical after all; the creative team were simply responding to an invitation offered four centuries earlier.