The RSC has led the way in adaptations of contemporary historical novels, especially those set in Tudor and Stuart England. Following the trilogy of plays devoted to Hilary Mantel’s opus about the life of Thomas Cromwell – Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror & the Light – now Maggie O’Farrell’s 2021 novel Hamnet receives the page to stage treatment. Premiered in Stratford-upon-Avon earlier this year, the West End transfer of Lolita Chakrabti’s 2.5 hour adaptation directed by Erica Whyman is a little less successful than the Mantel trilogy, a slightly desiccated version of the novel that is workmanlike in its construction, assembling the key scenes of the original book but failing to find its emotional gravity and implications. And central to that is the failure to investigate and illuminate the life of the primary character himself who is so pivotal in the novel in several ways both as cipher for this family’s experience but also with agency of his own which is rather lacking in the reduced role he plays here. Alas Hamnet without much Hamnet effectively stymies itself.
The subject of O’Farrell’s novel is the origin story for the most famous play ever written, the son of William Shakespeare whose death and the scale of parental grief is captured in the play Hamlet whose thinly disguised title cannot hide the pain and lyricism of the greatest exploration of mortality ever staged, the justice of life and death decisions or the purpose of existential debates that plague the title character almost to the end of this remarkable, influential drama. O’Farrell conceives the reason for this play’s existence within a loving family story that turns into a domestic and more intimate experience than the RSC’s new production manages to achieve. What O’Farrell did so intriguingly in the novel was to take the audience’s assumptions about the creation of Hamlet and expand that backwards into Shakespeare’s marriage and the building of his family life to unpick the meanings and motivations of the play itself. And while the overt acknowledgement of Shakespeare’s output was never central to the plot as such, the reader’s recognition and understanding of Hamlet as a cultural product was an important element of the novel, noting how this complex study of grief and family tragedy was given greater purpose. Yet the RSC’s interpretation, while faithful to elements and the overarching shape of the book, makes too little of the connection between Hamnet and Hamlet.
Chakrabati has straightened out the timelines of the original source material, and where O’Farrell blended the developing romance between Agnes Hathaway and William with the subsequent experience of family life, Chakrabati plays these activities sequentially, a very traditional stage drama in which the name of the title character is not even heard until the very end of Act One at the moment of his birth. As theatre, this is certainly easier to manage than two concurrent timelines and requires fewer actors to play the children at various stages of their life. but its loss is significant in terms of the foreboding that ultimately shapes the early experience of these characters. O’Farrell’s approach offers three key dimension, the love story unfolding in one strand which is both overshadowed and given perspective by the sections of family life that the reader knows will only end in death, and, finally, the spectral figure of the play that sits above it all, great art emerging from great pain. The more traditional trajectory that Chakrabati imposes denies the audience that same perspective and as a result isolates our emotional responses.
Act One focuses primarily on Agnes, as the book does, establishing her personal circumstances as a working woman that brings her into contact with Shakespeare while living with her brother and his second wife. Early in the play, Agnes soon has a household of her own while the character’s role as a seer is important, the nature-reading and predictive skills set Agnes in contrast with others making her a figure of suspicion in the town as a differently educated woman than her soon-to-be erudite husband, son of a glovemaker. This is one of the play’s major themes, comparing the Latin-based education that takes the grammar school boy first to London and then to authorial greatness with Agnes equally valid intuitive skills that help her to run a household essentially alone and commune somehow with the spirit of her child before its birth. This creation of character takes its prompts from O’Farrell, placing Agnes at the heart of the story and giving her complex female-centered narrative that focuses on motherhood especially. And in Act One, Agnes asserts the shape and purpose of family life, dealing initially with her brother’s already blended household and eventually moving into the Shakespeare establishment where she too becomes a matriarch.
In Act Two, the rest of the family, Hamnet’s death and its consequences are contained in little over an hour of storytelling which feels too little ultimately for the scope and impact of the piece. It means particularly that the pivotal creation of Hamnet, his childhood, personality and vitally any relationship he has with his father feels rather anemic and dealt fairly short shrift by this adaptation. Hamnet has a few scenes but is disposed of rather rapidly, leaving Agnes to deal with the outcomes and discover the reality of her husband’s life in the capital. But the platform for all of that is fundamentally weakened by the decision not to stage crucial childhood experiences from the book. Hamnet and his twin Judith come as a pair and, with the fast-forwarded timeline as Act Two begins, the audience only really meets them as individuals briefly, jumping almost instantly to their illness that first affects the sister and quickly grips her brother as well. Yet there is too little time to explore this character and his personal effect on the story. Instead Chakrabati relies on an overly simplistic staging convention to mark the emotional shifts at this point in the story that assume a parent would be devastated by and mourn the loss of their child. What we loose through this is the specificity of Hamnet as a family member and the personal, individual nature of his relationship to those around him that centres on who he is rather than his role as a generic device.
What the RSC’s version somewhat fails to do is then build enough of a connection between Hamnet and his father, who barely appear in a scene together, to make the play’s ending at a London theatre as meaningful as it could be. Shakespeare is a relatively remote figure in O’Farrell’s book and beyond the original love story he darts quickly to the city where his reputation keeps him from domestic business back in Warwickshire. But the novel retains sufficient engagement with young Hamnet to create the conditions in which the father writes his dramatic lament. On stage, that connectivity is far looser, the famous writer still absent but the play is unable to mark the same through line from grief and love to creativity and immortality. The final segment of Act Two becomes much more about Agnes discovering Will’s working world and her anger regarding his long separation from their lives (which is distinctly under-powered and sudden when they eventually argue about it) then reaching the meaning of Hamlet and how it came to be fed through with the real life experience of the Shakepeares.
Staged on Tom Piper’s multilayered set, director Whyman centres much of the action in the middle of the playing space which audiences in the Upper Circle will appreciate given the curvature of the Garrick Theatre at this level. Replicating the house described by O’Farrell with its A-frame structure and mezzanine level, Piper’s wooden set evokes the era well while providing plenty of flexibility to wheel on tables, beds and counters to reflect the changing locations and the area where Agnes grew up. Later in Act Two, it also doubles for London, inventively creating platforms and semi-stages that show Will’s theatrical world as he rehearsed various works, then transports the audience to The Globe Theatre itself and the crucial production of Hamlet that ends the story. It does enough to suggest its era while being sufficiently simple and representative to house scenes across Agnes and Will’s married life and its changing geographical locations.
As Agnes, Madeleine Mantock’s central performance is an important one, the point of view that ultimately holds the story together. Mantock captures the spiritual, earth-mother intuition that defines Agnes, giving a mix of wistful and practical that breathes life into O’Farrell’s original heroine. There is a strong independence too, a certainly that she knows her own body and her mind, trusting its rhythms and instincts to guide her to the right path. And when tragedy finally comes, Mantock folds in on herself, amplifying the grief though her silent withdrawal and pondering the absence of her husband. Tom Varey’s Will is a deliberately shadowy presence, a hint of the famous man, more present early in the story when less of his life is known to the audience before he moves to the capital. Varey is suitably self-involved as the burgeoning playwright but Hamnet gives too little sense of the catastrophic effect of death on his life and, by extension, his world, while his connection with Agnes is not drawn as strongly as it might be.
Chakrabati’s linear narrative ends in the playhouse with the drama inspired by the events of Hamnet, in which the title character also plays Hamlet in a moment where wisps of that magical text complete their journey from first romance to Shakespeare fulfilling his destiny. The RSC’s production is a mechanical transfer from the page, looking to capture the primary incidences of the novel and shape them into a clearer narrative that is simple to follow. But extracting the presence of Hamnet himself from this story severs the emotional connection between the boy and the powerful fiction his father would go on to create, and although Agnes gets a central role in a story that is still very much hers as well, without O’Farrell’s layered narrative, the play loses momentum. An accomplished if rather dry adaptation of Hamnet, the enduring power of Shakespeare’s play, inspired by the son he lost, is hardly there at all.
Hamnet is at the Garrick Theatre until 17 February with tickets from £25. Follow this site on Twitter @culturalcap1 or Facebook Cultural Capital Theatre Blog