Hamlet Hail to the Thief evaluation – learn about of righteous anger hyperlinks Shakespeare to Radiohead

In all of the hype across the collaborators in this co-production between the Royal Shakespeare Company and Factory International, it’s simple to disregard what’s at its centre. It isn’t the co-directors, Steven Hoggett and Christine Jones, in spite of CVs that reach from American Idiot to Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. It isn’t even Thom Yorke, the Radiohead frontman who has gutted and repurposed the band’s doomy 2003 album Hail to the Thief for the display’s soundtrack.

No, this can be a 425-year-old play by way of William Shakespeare – and a startling efficiency by way of Samuel Blenkin because the bereaved prince, who does certainly have as a lot to rail towards the arena about as Yorke and his band did within the aftermath of 9/11 and the ascendency of George W Bush.

It used to be Jones who made the relationship between Hamlet and the Radiohead album when she used to be running as a dressmaker on any other manufacturing of the play twenty years in the past. Both are characterized by way of angry-young-man tirades towards energy, corruption and lies, however on this staging, the hyperlinks between the 2 are left implicit.

What it’s, in Blenkin’s palms, is a learn about of righteous anger. With unkempt hair and hangdog manner, he has ethical pressure on his aspect, arguing in moderation, logically, exactingly in regards to the hypocrisy of the uncle who has murdered his father and the complicity of the society that facilitates him. He is a voice of a era exasperated by way of the disasters of his superiors, his twitchy paranoia as actual because the fury that erupts when he confronts Gertrude (an eminently affordable Claudia Harrison) or enters a twitchy pas de deux with Claudius (a spineless Paul Hilton).

With Frantic Assembly’s Hoggett on the wheel, this can be a Hamlet which, even at a brisk two hours, unearths time for physical-theatre sequences to embrace an international out of kilter. It is within the frivolous gestures of a partying court docket, dancing to Go to Sleep, or in the way in which Hamlet turns into imbalanced by way of gravity when he tells his pals he has misplaced his mirth.

It is all performed out between the half-dozen Fender amps laid out on an austere set by way of the design collective AMP running with Sadra Tehrani, and lit with brutal precision by way of Jessica Hung Han Yun, whose monochrome palate will get no hotter than a smoggy yellow. With such a lot angst, even Ophelia (an uncompromising Ami Tredrea) will get a flip at “to be or not to be”.

And, sure, imagine the hype: Yorke’s preparations are super. Performed by way of a five-piece band, remoted in sound cubicles and accompanied with a lot reverb by way of singers Megan Hill and Ed Begley, it rumbles and twitches, erupting in nice swells of electro-rock noise at moments of largest depth. Ophelia’s derangement is expressed by the use of the wonky nursery rhyme of Sail to the Moon; Hamlet’s snowy go back to Elsinore delivered with a falsetto Scatterbrain; and the homicide of Polonius (Tom Peters, extra well-meaning than fatuous) is adopted by way of the roar of There, There.

There is a slightly of the Grand Guignol within the spectacle and the abnormal narrative shortcut, however Hamlet Hail to the Thief works as a lucid, angsty revenge tragedy, performed with readability and verve.