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This month a rather unusual theatre show will open in Manchester. Hamlet Hail to the Thief is a collaboration between the Royal Shakespeare Company, Factory International and the art-rock musician Thom Yorke, which fuses Shakespeare’s four-centuries-old tragedy with a live reworking of Radiohead’s 2003 album. The adaptation, co-directed by Christine Jones and Steven Hoggett, echoes the recording’s dystopian themes, with Elsinore as a surveillance state in which “paranoia reigns”.
“The time is out of joint . . . ”, proclaims the teaser for Hamlet Hail to the Thief (accompanied by a dissonant Radiohead chord). And what is the thinking person to do when “the time is out of joint” and there is “something rotten in the state”? When we feel that we are being “cozened” — cheated — by those in power? Do we speak or do we act? Or do we acknowledge, in Hamlet’s dying words, that the only rest “is silence”? These restless questions are why today every one of us is Hamlet. Or at least every one of us who has — one of his key words — a “conscience.”
Hamlet Hail to the Thief is among an unprecedentedly varied batch of reworked Hamlets currently on offer. On the RSC’s main stage, Elsinore has been reimagined as a 1912 ocean liner in turbulent waters. At first sight, this is a curious choice by director Rupert Goold since it is by sea that Hamlet departs the court of his murderous uncle King Claudius, before an encounter with pirates leads him back to his final showdown. But as an allusion to the ancient metaphor of the ship of state (that needs a wise helmsman) the idea is ingenious. Meanwhile, if you happen to be in San Francisco, you can see Eddie Izzard perform the entire play as a one-person show (the endurance feat was performed in London last year, and returns to the UK this autumn).
Coming soon, too, is a revival at London’s Barbican of one of the triumphs of last year’s Edinburgh Festival: the Peruvian theatre company Teatro La Plaza’s deconstruction of Hamlet played by a cast of actors with Down syndrome. Then you can go back to the RSC in the summer and watch James Ijames’s 2021 Pulitzer Prize-winning play Fat Ham, a reworking that sets the action at a barbecue in the American south held by the family of a Black queer man.
You can even enter the world of deconstructed Hamlet without leaving the house. Just stream Grand Theft Hamlet, an award-winning 2024 documentary filmed entirely within the world of the video game Grand Theft Auto: the true story of two actors who relieved the boredom of the UK’s Covid lockdowns — an out of joint time if ever there were one — by attempting to stage a production of Hamlet inside the game. They found several online players who were, so to speak, game for the attempt, though inevitably encountered certain difficulties when others turned up in helicopters and fast cars to “waste” members of the cast.
Watching that film, which had moments of beauty as well as a plenitude of both silliness and gore, I was reminded of a hilarious scene in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Last Action Hero (1993). A teacher tells her class that Hamlet was “one of the first action heroes” and shows them a clip of the 1948 Laurence Olivier film, in which the Prince of Denmark hesitates and soliloquises instead of plunging his sword into the back of the uncle who has killed his father. “Don’t talk. Just do it,” complains the boy who has the magical power of entering the universe of his own action hero. Olivier morphs into Arnie, who lights a cigar, says “Hey Claudius, you killed my father — big mistake,” and throws him out of a window. “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” intones the voiceover, “and Hamlet is taking out the trash — no one’s going to tell this sweet prince goodnight.” And perhaps the worlds of high drama and mass entertainment are not so far apart — after all, every great tragedy, from the ancient Greeks to Shakespeare, ends in a bloodbath.
Hamlet’s preferred vehicle for change — “words, words, words” — are to no avail. Agonisingly, he must resort to the very thing that takes him down to the level of his opponents: violence. Which leads inexorably to the one certainty in the world of the play, the one certainty in life: death. “Your worm is your only emperor for diet,” says the sweet Prince after he has killed the meddling Polonius, “We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service — two dishes, but to one table. That’s the end.” We are all destined for the same end, food for maggot and worm.
But are we? Shakespeare is not dead in the way that most of us will die. His words defy death every time they are revived in the mouth of an actor, the imagination of a stage or film director, the mind of a reader. And of all his plays, Hamlet is the one that speaks most resonantly when times are out of joint. That may be because it delves most deeply, if often obliquely, into the dilemmas of its own time: the tension between radical scepticism and faith in God’s providence; the end of feudalism and the rise of bourgeois individualism; the uncertainty over succession to the childless Elizabeth I; the battle between Catholicism and Protestantism (the ghost of Hamlet’s father comes from purgatory, a Catholic idea, whereas young Hamlet studies at Wittenberg, cradle of Martin Luther’s Reformation).
Of all works of art, Hamlet remains the profoundest meditation on the state of nations that are beset by corruption and instability. It is the world we live in too, as the established international order crumbles, revenge becomes a defining feature of modern politics, and lightning-speed advances in artificial intelligence challenge the belief that human beings are, in Hamlet’s words, “the paragon of animals,” unique in “apprehension how like a god.” And that is why Hamlet, whether on stage to the tune of Radiohead’s Orwellian “2+2=5” or watched from the couch with popcorn, is a play for today.
April 27-May 18, factoryinternational.org; June 4-28, rsc.org.uk
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