Hamnet, Swan Theatre review — tender take on Maggie O’Farrell’s novel

It’s hard to imagine a happier home for the adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s prizewinning novel Hamnet than Stratford, the town still reverberating with the lives it explores, those of Shakespeare and his wife, Anne Hathaway. It’s harder to figure out how the focused interiority of O’Farrell’s spellbinding prose will translate to the stage. Her evocation of the physical lived sense of another’s being is so intense that I’ve heard of parents of young boys putting off reading it, in case the death of 11-year-old Hamnet Shakespeare proves too shattering.

Adapter Lolita Chakrabarti has crafted a quieter show for the Royal Shakespeare Company, without the intellectual dazzle of her celebrated take on Life of Pi. Pulling apart the novel’s layered narrative and alternating timeframes, she’s gone for a chronological approach, the first half dealing with the pair’s courtship and speedy marriage, to the horror of their quarrelsome families. This lopsidedness results in the title character being offstage for much of the running time, but this loss is compensated by centring the enigmatic Hathaway, here named Agnes (played by fresh-faced Madeleine Mantock).

In Erica Whyman’s bare-boards production, the bee-keeping, animal-feeding daily grind of rural life sweatily conjured up in the novel is here confined to sound effects. Two double-height ladders rise to a platform, forming not only the attic where the lovers are consigned but also the letter A, as the illiterate Agnes proudly informs her scribbling swain.

Tom Varey as William gambols about to signify youthfulness. Bullied by his glovemaker father (Peter Wight), he retreats to the attic to write “what I cannot say”. This is not the infatuated Shakespeare of the sonnets or the intellectual of the poems and plays, but that was O’Farrell’s point: to present these characters as simple human beings, eating, struggling, suffering. Mantock and Varey make a tender pair of lovers and parents.

The depiction of Agnes’s first pregnancy links visually to the novel’s washday scenes as Mantock stands on a platform while household women rhythmically wind sheets around her to shape a gravid silhouette. Generally, theatrical magic is eschewed in favour of emotional realism. Loveable Hamnet (Ajani Cabey) finally makes his appearance in the second half, darting about along with quieter sister Judith (Alex Jarrett). Shakespeare has decamped to London, where scenes with Will Kemp (Wight again, excellent) and Richard Burbage (Will Brown) don’t entirely escape the larky tone of TV’s Upstart Crow as they badger William to finish his new play.

The plot follows the history as it must: Hamnet dies tragically to be curiously reborn in Hamlet; the scene shifts to the Globe theatre, Cabey steps out as the Prince and thrilling use is made of the notion that the playwright himself played Old Hamlet. Hamnet makes few intellectual demands of its audience, but neither does it patronise them with crass foreshadowing or anachronistic social attitudes. It’s a quiet, thoughtful entertainment — screaming birth-scenes excepted — that builds to a fine intensity. The book still packs the greater emotional punch.

★★★★☆

To June 17, then the Garrick Theatre, London, September 30-January 6 2024, rsc.org.uk