Thom Yorke reworks Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief into a live score for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Hamlet, staged at the Barbican after Manchester and Stratford.
The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Hamlet Hail to the Thief, set to Radiohead’s sixth album, opens its first London season at the Barbican Centre on Saturday 31 October 2026.
Radiohead released Hail to the Thief in 2003, with many of Thom Yorke’s lyrics written in response to the war on terror. The designer and director Christine Jones saw Hamlet in it: a government deluding its people, and a prince looking for his moral compass inside that state.
Yorke broke the songs into fragments and reworked them as a score played live on stage. Jones directs with Steven Hoggett, a founder of Frantic Assembly. The pair also made Harry Potter and the Cursed Child together.
The production opened at Aviva Studios in Manchester in April 2025 and moved to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon that June. Both runs sold out.
The London run continues the company’s long partnership with the Barbican. Its Elsinore is a surveillance state, and the play narrows to Hamlet and Ophelia waking to the lies around them.
Samuel Blenkin plays Hamlet and Ami Tredrea plays Ophelia. Radiohead do not perform: the company’s own band and singers play Yorke’s orchestrations.