A sell-out when it ran at the RSC’s Swan Theatre, Lolita Chakrabarti’s stage adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s best-selling novel had already extended its West End run before its official first night. Its title character is the only son of William Shakespeare, a boy who died when he was only eleven, and at the heart of the play is the effect of that loss on his parents, though it gives a glimpse of their lives from their first meeting and covers a time span of some 8 years.
Both book and play begin with 11-year-old Hamnet, but where the book moves backwards and forwards through time, the play presents events chronologically. The Hamnet and his twin sister Judith who flit through the early scenes are not born yet; they are in the mind of the woman who will give birth to them, Agnes Hathaway (that’s the name that her father uses in his will, not Anne as we have come to know her), and it is Agnes who is at this play’s centre.
We have baptism, marriage and death dates, some records of business and property dealing for Shakespeare and his family, we can visit the house he was born and grew up in and where he presumably first lived after his marriage, his maternal grandparent’s farm, Agnes’s family home, but we don’t know the details of their private life—that’s conjecture. We don’t really know what happened after what’s often been seen as a shotgun wedding between 18-year-old William and an older Agnes, can only guess why and when he went to London, how often he came back.
This is Maggie O’Farrell’s version of what might have been. To emphasise that it is not established fact, both novel and play use only first names, no surnames, but it is a perfectly plausible fiction.
Young Agnes is an orphan in a sheep farming family. She is not at ease with her god-fearing stepmother Joan (Sarah Belcher), for Agnes has second sight—that’s why she can hear the twins’ whispered exchanges—and from her mother had learned the uses of herbs and folk medicine, though she didn’t pass on reading and writing.
William is the son of leather-working glove-maker John. His dad thinks him a wastrel who should get down to a real job, but he meets Agnes when he is paying off John’s debt for some sheepskins by tutoring Agnes’s brothers in Latin. There is an electric attraction between free spirit Agnes and William and, though pregnancy makes marriage urgent, this seems like a love match.
Business isn’t going well for Peter Wight’s blustery John and his civic status is declining, so William goes to London to find buyers for his dad’s gloves. That is how he gets involved with the theatre, for the players have special requirements, they need his help. From provisioner, he turns into playwright. We catch up with him when Richard Burbage (Will Brown) and Will Kempe (Peter Wight) are planning the transpontine transfer of the Theatre’s timbers to Bankside to become the Globe.
When the spirits of Hamnet and Judith become live twins, the playful vitality that Alex Jarrett and Ajani Cabey give them becomes calmer and their closeness especially touching as she gets the plague and he tends her through it. The family joy at her recovery is suddenly marred by discovering him dead.
The play then becomes about the reaction of his parents. Madeleine Mantock’s Agnes, already looking more mature in dress and hairstyle, now struggles with the loss and feels deserted, while Tom Varey’s William puts his grief into his plays, and we see the actor who was his Hamnet in Hamlet. That seems theatrical artifice more than logic, but it becomes a symbol for William’s process.
It isn’t possible to fit the whole book on stage in one evening; its admirers have to accept that. Moving rapidly through short scenes, sometimes with big jumps in time, there is too much to cram in to allow for much depth, though there is sometimes fine detail, such as the feather than Agnes finds to make William a quill pen, and dramatic highlights include strong physical moments, including one copulation, a wedding, three births and a funeral.
Tom Piper’s timber setting makes for swift transitions and looks well under Prima Mehta’s warm lighting and dramatic shadows, with a feeling of Elizabethan domestic architecture and then theatrical structure when scenes move to the Globe stage. It is there, as the play draws to a close, that Agnes confronts William. Conciliation surely follows.
Ingenious and intriguing, its performances hold the attention, but a stronger focus on its main characters would pay dividends.