Thom Yorke: Radiohead singer to provide soundtrack for Harold Pinter’s Old Times

'I’m hopeful this collaboration will result in a new kind of theatregoer coming to our show'

Thom Yorke will provide the music for a Harold Pinter play (AP)

Soundtracking a work by arguably the English language’s most menacing playwright with music by one of Britain’s most celebrated miserablists is quite a combination.

Broadway audiences will be treated to a production of Harold Pinter’s Old Times with music provided by Thom Yorke, the lead singer of the indie band Radiohead who has written a “heartbreaking” musical accompaniment, according to its director.

While Pinter’s work was once memorably described as the “comedy of menace” by a critic – a label that the playwright was not entirely happy with – Radiohead became famous for songs such as “Creep” and “Paranoid Android” appealing to an audience of shoe-gazing introverts.

Playwright Harold Pinter (Getty) (Getty Images)

“I’ve enjoyed exploring through music the script’s themes of love and memory as well as Pinter’s rhythms, twists and turns,” said Yorke in a statement.

Douglas Hodge, the show’s director, praised the finished result and added that he hoped Yorke’s music would attract a different kind of crowd to a play first performed in 1971.

“The music Thom has written for Old Times gives an immediacy and a ‘now-ness’ to the show,” he said.

“The play itself is about memory and love – Thom’s music works backwards and forwards and plays with time and repetition in the same way Pinter does.

“I’m hopeful this collaboration will result in a new kind of theatregoer coming to our show.”

The play opens at the Roundabout theatre in New York in October.