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Who knew that the world needed a mashup of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy and Radiohead’s angry response to George W Bush’s 2003 election victory? But it turns out we very much do. For this bonkers, extraordinary event, play and album have been smashed into one another by co-creators Christine Jones, Steven Hoggett and the band’s frontman and creative driver Thom Yorke.
The resulting fragments have been brutally sieved, the grist fused into an urgent, frantic 100-minute work that’s part drama, part dance piece and part gig. That it’s opened in Factory International’s cavernous Aviva Studios in Manchester before visiting the Royal Shakespeare Company’s main stage in Stratford-upon-Avon adds to the peculiar, cool energy. (There are no London dates – yet.)
The apron stage is hung with black jackets, dotted with amps and lined with black sound insulation. Behind, the six instrumentalists are isolated in glass-fronted studios at the base of Elsinore’s castle wall, with singers Ed Begley and Megan Hill periodically appearing in doorways above to give a keening commentary on the action. The costumes are mostly black - the RSC and art-rock bands share a taste for the monochrome. Indeed, Samuel Blenkin’s frail and compelling Hamlet looks kind of like a tousle-haired indie frontman who’s been starving himself of food and sleep in pursuit of an elusive, anguished lyric.
The script has been brutally but expertly pruned, the songs mostly atomised into repeated, wordless phrases or note progressions: there’s a near constant eddy of drum and bass murmurs or vocal sighs throughout. I know the play better than I know Hail to the Thief but I heard the ghostly oscillations of Sit Down, Stand Up and – I think – the riffs of Backdrift. Hamlet sings a snatch of Scatterbrained at his most oppressed, while Ophelia gets a few poignant lines of the of the melancholic Sail to the Moon.
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She also speaks the To Be Or Not to Be soliloquy, which makes a kind of sense: Ophelia arguably chooses to end her own life, where Hamlet is just a victim of his own prevarication. One of the surprises of the show is the foregrounding of Ophelia as a character with agency, played with a fierce resilience by Ami Tredrea. Claudia Harrison is a forceful Gertrude too, while Paul Hilton is at his most serpentine as Claudius.
The music and Jess Williams’s jagged, spasming choreography regularly overwhelm the text at moments of high emotion. Ophelia and Hamlet are first seen enjoying a goofy, groovy,
flirtatious dance together. The final duel is played as a wordless, lethal pas de deux with music thrashing behind.
Christine Jones is best known as a creator of immersive environments and a scenographer with her company AMP (who collaborated on the sets here with Sadra Tehrani). But she seems to have been the prime mover on this extraordinary cross-genre adventure, coaxing Yorke into it, sharing her vision with Hoggett (a director and choreographer) and fusing a diverse team of creative and producing partners into a whole.
The parallels between the dystopia we’re living through, an earlier US political snafu, and the dysfunction and moral corruption of Hamlet’s Denmark are implicit rather than explicit. True, there are moments where the angst-fuelled sound and fury feel a little overblown and undergraduate. But it’s a powerful stab at a gesamtkunstwerk.
I’m not saying that a 400-year-old play and a 22-year-old record have been made relevant for ‘the kids’ – this is more for the despairingly liberal, chin-stroking middle aged. But the show is exactly the sort of shot in the arm that the RSC’s new artistic directors, Tamara Harvey and Daniel Evans, needed to give the organisation.
At Aviva Studios, home of Factory International, until 18 May; then at the RSC’s Royal Shakespeare Theatre 4-28 June
