Hamlet Hail To the Thief
The Royal Shakespeare Theatre
Stratford upon Avon
★★★★★

HAMLET, perhaps the world’s most famous play, has endured many directorial treatments, one of the most exciting being Rupert Goold’s earlier this year at the same theatre. This latest co-produced by the RSC and Factory International and directed by Christine Jones, is titled after the 2003 Radiohead album. The band’s Thom York has reworked the music into a soundscape for a text paired to its skeletal bones.

Radiohead has been noted for its music and style reflecting the alienation of modern life, here speaking urgently to Shakespeare’s iconic eponymous hero’s plight.

We enter a funereal world. Dimly discerned through the swirling mists over Elsinore, lines of bodyless black clothes hover over the empty stage rising to introduce the feverous action. At the end they lower over a graveyard of dead bodies.

There is none of the usual questing philosophy beloved of the academies here. Hamlet after all is a relatively simple revenge play, uniquely enriched by the Bard’s poetic genius.

If we lose much of the verbal music, the 100 minute action merges superbly orchestrated movement, music and words, brilliantly lit, into almost a single statement of human despair.

At its centre Samuel Blenkin’s tousled headed youthful avenger and, of equal impact, Ami Tredrea’s frustrated Ophelia, both caught up in a whirlwind, victims of a tragic, disinterested dynamism. Shakespeare knew, “If it be now, tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come.”

Some will balk at what they will see as a willing distortion of a treasured classic drama. This is not, however, an adaptation of their treasured Hamlet, but rather a theatre piece built on a story which existed long before Shakespeare, employing modern music, modern dance and modern technology to capture our confusion, anger, and despair at the folly, deceit and cruelty of our contemporary world, a world he would have recognised.

My impression was that the standing ovation from a somewhat younger than usual audience signalled something more than their enjoyment at a splendid show. Oh yes, and one of the most informative programmes I have seen.

Runs until June 28. Box Office 0789 333-111, rsc.org.uk