It is not only the tragically short life of William Shakespeare’s son that lies at the heart of Maggie O’Farrell’s award-winning novel, Hamnet, but also that of his wife, Agnes Hathaway, of whom so little is known.
Agnes, charmingly played by Madeleine Mantock, is the focus of Lolita Chakrabarti’s light but slick adaptation in the handsomely refurbished Swan theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon. A natural healer, clairvoyant and illiterate, we are taken from her first meeting with a teenage William (Tom Varey) – a Latin tutor and wastrel in his bullying father’s eyes – to their marriage and grief in the aftermath of Hamnet’s death.
The first half focuses on their love story and the births of the children, Susanna (Harmony Rose-Bremner), and twins, Judith (Alex Jarrett) and Hamnet (Ajani Cabey). The second jumps by over a decade to 1596 when Judith is taken ill with the bubonic plague and, just as she recovers, Hamnet, who has been closely caring for her, falls fatally ill from contagion at the age of 11.
Directed by Erica Whyman, it is a story of parental loss but looks more like Shakespeare in Love at first – sweet, easy on the eye, with heavy helpings of romance, everything seems imbued with a golden glow. Chakrabarti’s adaptation gives O’Farrell’s narrative a clear linear chronology, although the interiority of grief feels flattened, there are a few cheesy lines and cornily whispered voiceovers.
Hamnet’s death is heart-stopping, even if we do not get to know him or his two sisters beyond rather too superficial characterisation: we see the twins running around, playing and teasing, with Susanna the older, eye-rolling sister. William Shakespeare himself is rather scantily drawn too, with unrevealing lines, and he becomes a shadow once he leaves Stratford to make gloves for a theatre company in London and forge his way to greatness.
There are some amusing scenes that show the emergence of Shakespeare as the famed Bard of Avon, which take place while simple family life continues in Stratford, sometimes side by side on stage. We see him at the Globe theatre, rehearsing alongside his players, Richard Burbage, Henry Condell and William Kempe, and these are charming, comic moments, perhaps too briefly glimpsed.
The production builds its emotive power in the second half and shows Agnes and William dealing with grief in very different ways, Agnes unravelling into lamentation and paralysing depression, William into horrified silence. We see him escaping to London to immerse himself in work, although it is through his playwriting that his grief finds expression, as Agnes discovers movingly at the end.
We end with Hamlet – Shakespeare’s homage to Hamnet – and it all stays as sweeping and sentimental as a Hollywood film but hooks us in nonetheless, strongly performed across the board, with a simple, beguiling theatricality: Tom Piper’s wooden stage set is airy and beautiful. Oğuz Kaplangı’s compositions and Xana’s sound design combine the fiddle and recorder with the click of wood blocks and the kamale ngoni. It is a rather broad-brush portrait of the Shakespeares’ grief, but knows just how to pull at our heartstrings all the same.
