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As with Sunset Boulevard, just opened in London, fame and its price colour Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet, albeit handled in a very different style. Lolita Chakrabarti’s tender stage adaptation of O’Farrell’s heartbreaking story of the death of Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son had its premiere in Stratford-upon-Avon earlier this year. Now it shifts, aptly, to London, where the boy’s father would forge his success, enforcing his absence from the family home — to critical effect when illness strikes down his children.
On stage we get droll glimpses of the writer’s London life, as he struggles with deadlines, debts and distracted actors. But the main focus is on Shakespeare’s family: his troubled drunken father, his thoughtful sister, his young twins Hamnet and Judith, and above all his wife, here called Agnes. She’s beautifully played by Madeleine Mantock as a warm, grounded, clear-sighted woman, whose deeper vision allows to her spy something profound in the cocky young Latin tutor (Tom Varey) who comes courting.
We lose the novel’s interiority, its beautifully textured descriptions and the looping time structure that wraps death and life around one another. Here events unfold chronologically. At times that feels rushed or splintered and we don’t sit long enough with characters. Hamnet doesn’t feature fully until after the interval.
But there are riches too in translating the story to stage. Chakrabarti’s play is in constant conversation with Shakespeare’s dramas. Here, in place of courts and political intrigue, we see the warp and weft of domestic life: the women’s world, the business of cooking, cleaning, birth and death. It’s lovingly brought to life in Erica Whyman’s bright, warm production on Tom Piper’s timber-frame set.
There are also echoes of Shakespeare’s work throughout: the contrast between town and country, the brushes with the supernatural, the sympathy between twins. Hamlet, which Shakespeare would write about four years after the death of his son, hovers over the text: Hamnet opens with the same words — “Who’s there?” — and closes with the ghost’s plea: “Remember me.” Meanwhile Ajani Cabey’s mercurial, observant Hamnet hints at the fact that in losing him we perhaps lost another writer.
And at the heart of the drama — as in the novel — lies the interplay between life and art. As Hamnet becomes ill, we see the searing pain of grief: the frantic rush of the women trying to save him — pounding herbs, pouring water, lighting fires — followed by the awful stillness of death.
We watch Agnes’s mute rage at her husband’s apparent indifference as he speeds off back to London. But finally, when she travels to the capital to watch Hamlet, we see her understand that it’s in his work that the playwright has articulated both his grief and hers — and that, in so doing, he has created something that can speak for many. What’s most touching is that, by bringing O’Farrell’s story to stage, Chakrabarti and the creative team are able to respond by making Hamnet seem to live again.
★★★★☆
To February 17, rsc.org.uk
