The Latest Breaking News from Hamnet

Start the year off right with some 21st century classics

Initially slow, the show about Shakespeare and his family weaves a beguiling narrative web around the creation of life and art

The RSC has reopened its refurbished Swan Theatre with an eagerly anticipated adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s bestselling novel Hamnet, said Sam Marlowe in The Stage. As “snug and supple” a fit for the Stratford stage as one of the bespoke gloves made by William Shakespeare’s bullying father, it imagines the…

Shakespeare’s wife moves centre stage in Lolita Chakrabarti’s pivotal adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, while urgent productions from two small London theatres tackle recent history head on

A collection of cultural highlights for the coming weekend

The Time Traveler’s Wife and Hamnet are among novels written, and largely read, by women coming to the British stage

Lies told and truths hidden give compelling life to fiction and memoir by authors from Maggie O’Farrell to Ocean Vuong and Claire Keegan

Adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel will premiere at Swan theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon in April

Writers from William Shakespeare to Angela Carter and George RR Martin have been been inspired by the doubled lives of these familial pairs