Hamlet Hail to the Thief at Barbican Theatre – review

Well, this is fun. A mash-up of a radically cut Hamlet by a playwright writing in 1599 and Radiohead’s doomy 2003 album creates a lot of sound and fury and energetic dance. Whether it signifies anything (to misquote another Shakespeare play) is arguable, but it is certainly an enjoyable ride.

The co-production between the RSC and Factory International premiered in Manchester last year and now, with the support of the ATC Music Group, TEG+ and Nate Koch (it takes a lot of producers to get ambition on stage these days), it settles into the Barbican for an extended run.

Its co-creators and co-directors are Thom Yorke (who fixed the music), Christine Jones (of AMP) and Steven Hoggett (of Frantic Assembly fame), who between them turn the experience into a cross between a gig, a rave and an expressive dance. The setting, devised by AMP (featuring Sadra Tehrani) is brilliantly nightmarish but also practical: a towering wall with speakers, doorways and window frames built in, both concert platform and castle. At the base, six superb musicians play the score, fractured, atmospheric and reorchestrated. Two singers, Ed Begley and Meg Hill, occasionally appear at the doorways above.

In this world, lit by Jessica Hung Han Yun with hot white spotlights and dark shadows, movement (choreographer Jess Williams) is as much a part of character as speech. When Samuel Blenkin’s Hamlet first meets Ophelia (Ami Tredrea), they launch into a synchronised dance, tribute to their tenderness; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Miles Barrow and Halim Diwani) arrive like a couple of whirring dervishes, enveloping Hamlet in their moves; Paul Hilton’s magnificent, haunted Claudius dominates proceedings, long arms shooting out, wild and ominous, a tinpot dictator taking hold of a fragile world, plucking on an imaginary heartstring when he feels fear.

Ophelia is the principal beneficiary of this approach. Her relationship with Hamlet, as they both navigate a place peopled by people who have little care for them, is made more real by how they interact. Her decline, through fear, to a decision – she repeats Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” – to toppling into her own grave, is carefully charted.

But elsewhere there is a curious blandness. The songs, wonderfully orchestrated by Yorke and arranged by Justin Levine, form a resonating backdrop but the action seems to flatten itself in response. The cuts – the play is down from around three hours to an unbroken 100 minutes – strip out most of the poetry, and all the thought. They are intelligent in terms of moving the action forward, but once Hamlet gets reduced to its plot there’s not much left. He gets told to avenge the murder of his father and doesn’t do anything about it. Until the end, which here is rendered as an unusually bloody knife fight with lots of poison spitting.

Blenkin’s Hamlet starts hysterical and gets more so. The production doesn’t really give him space to develop a trajectory. So, the play becomes Hamlet as spectacle rather than as philosophy. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a thrilling ride. But don’t expect enlightenment.