In more innocent times, when pandemics were something that happened in history books, Maggie O’Farrell spun a fable about the route of a plague to England in the summer of 1596. It started with a monkey, three fleas and a cabin boy in the port of Alexandria and ended up making its way to Worcestershire in the wadding of a box of beads, where it killed Hamnet, the 11-year-old son of a Latin teacher turned playwright. A few years later William Shakespeare would premiere one of the world’s greatest tragedies, Hamlet.
Shakespeare is known to have been touring a play in Kent at the time of his son’s death. “It’s not even known if he made it back to the funeral. I hope he did,” says O’Farrell, who was so haunted by the story that she held off writing about it until her own son was safely past the age of 11 (like Shakespeare, she has a son and two daughters). In her bestselling novel, Hamnet, she allowed the grieving father to be with his family at the graveside: “I think him arriving in my novel was a wish-fulfilment for him.”
The novel was published in spring 2020, just as the world was shutting down, and its evocation of that earlier pestilence seemed part of its uncanny genius. It went on to sell 1.5m copies worldwide and win the Women’s prize for fiction. Three years later, it is on the brink of a new life in the town in which Hamnet died, where a stage adaptation will reopen the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Swan theatre after a three-year closure, before moving on to the West End in London. The plague interlude is obviously no longer necessary, says O’Farrell, “because we’ve been there, right? We’ve been to Alexandria and Venice in our heads as we sat isolated in our homes, watching the news. You no longer need to explain what a pestilence is. It’s not wonderful. It’s dark. But we’ve had this collective experience.”
Hamnet tells the story of 18 years of Shakespeare’s life from the point of view of his wife, who has traditionally been known as poor, neglected Anne Hathaway, the illiterate countrywoman who was left behind with their three children when her husband set off for the bright lights of London, and was only bequeathed his second-best bed. Parish records revealed she was in fact christened Agnes by her sheep-farmer father. O’Farrell portrays her as a healer and herbalist, pointing out that far from being “this embittered wife abandoned in Stratford-upon-Avon”, Agnes went on to invest her husband’s earnings in her own malting business, as well as running the big house he bought in 1597 for the princely sum of £60 in silver. It was there that he chose to retire, surrounded by his family, and where he died at the age of 52.
The woman who has been charged with transporting the story from page to stage is Lolita Chakrabarti, an actor and playwright whose previous successes include adapting the multi-award-winning Life of Pi, which has just opened on Broadway. She had not read Hamnet before agreeing to take on the job. “I’ve lived in Shakespeare. I’ve played in it and watched it,” she says. It was Antony Sher’s RSC performance in Richard III that switched the lights on for her as a 15-year-old surgeon’s daughter on a school outing from Birmingham. “But to look at the family behind the man who made this work has been an extraordinary thing. And of course, we never think of the woman behind the man, do we? But now that I’ve read Maggie’s novel and been immersed in it, the influence of Agnes and of their family just seems such an obvious thing.”
We’re talking over video call in a break from rehearsals. Chakrabarti is downing a cup of soup in Stratford and O’Farrell is clutching a mug of tea in her Edinburgh home. Most of their communication was over email. “We did go back and forth quite a lot,” says O’Farrell, laughing as she recalls one particular email. “My husband asked how long it was and I realised it was 5,000 words. He said: ‘Jesus, I feel sorry for Lolita.’ I think I got quite carried away, but very nicely she didn’t say: ‘Why are you sending a 5,000-word essay about 16th-century guild membership?’”
Actually, says Chakrabarti: “I thought they were really good notes. Sometimes it was about historical accuracy, and sometimes because I had plucked something off Google to be the solution for the plague, and Maggie very rightly said: ‘No, it’s not that herb – it’s this one.’” One of the challenges was to distil 18 years of interrupted life into a two-hour play. “Writing chronologically complex plots is something that really appeals to me. You can get away with flashbacks and flash-forwards on the page, but on stage it’s a lot more difficult, so I had a bit of sympathy for Lolita,” says O’Farrell.
“Yeah, there were actually lots of challenges,” says Chakrabarti. “It’s about nature, which is beautiful on film, but how do you do that on stage? And then there is the fact that a lot of it feels quite internal.” Agnes’s intelligence unfolds in “premonitions, psychic instincts… I don’t know what it is, but that kind of spiritual side of things.”
Then there was the challenge of finding theatrical language for it. “I’ve tried to take what Maggie intended and distil it into theatrical Tudor, but current, so that it places them in their time, but we’re not too distanced from them as people,” says Chakrabarti. “I’ve put in some vernacular colour that I’ve invented, to suggest it is in Warwickshire of that time. I was really conscious that, up until quite recently, Shakespeare had become quite a middle-class thing, when in Tudor times there were different accents from all around the country, and all the actors were from everywhere. I really didn’t want this version to be RP [received pronunciation].”
The snobbishness of Shakespeare studies turned out to be a shared concern. For O’Farrell, this meant rescuing both Agnes and, to a certain extent, Shakespeare himself from the class prejudice that had labelled the couple “this literary genius saddled with an illiterate wife”. Why is there so much debate as to whether this provincial figure could have been responsible for some of the greatest plays in the English language, she asks. “If you think about Ben Jonson, and Christopher Marlowe, they were both classically educated, whereas Shakespeare probably left grammar school around the age of 15. There’s a feeling that therefore he couldn’t have done it. But just because you leave school doesn’t mean you stop learning.” As for Agnes: “At that time, of course, there wasn’t the education, or the opportunities, for her. But it doesn’t mean to say there weren’t different forms of intelligence and education. Illiteracy doesn’t equal stupidity or lack of intelligence, you know. It’s such a narrow way to regard them.”
The central question of Hamnet is the role that Agnes played in her husband’s creative life. “I think any exclusion may only have extended to the geographical, in that his work took place in London and she lived in the family home in Stratford. I’ve always been certain that you can find submerged traces of her everywhere in his work,” says O’Farrell, who tracked Agnes’s influence through the recurrent motifs of herbs and birds in Shakespeare’s plays, creating her own Elizabethan herb garden as part of her research into Agnes’s medicinal wisdom.
The question of what constitutes a creative partnership is one that plays to the personal experience of both women. O’Farrell is married to a fellow novelist, William Sutcliffe. “I wouldn’t say we collaborate exactly, but he is always my first reader, and he’s a very incisive one. He doesn’t pull his punches and isn’t afraid to tell me when something isn’t working – and, while that is sometimes hard to hear, it’s precisely what I need,” she says.
Chakrabarti is married to the actor Adrian Lester, whom she first met, aged 14, at Birmingham’s Midlands Arts Centre and who turned out to live in the same street. They became a couple as drama students at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada) and married in 1997. “Because we are in the same business I understand the complete immersion you need in order to make a new role. Of course life continues and chores need to be done, but I am always surprised, when I see the show, on screen or on stage, at what he has created. It doesn’t always fit with the demands of life, but I know that focus is necessary,” she says.
In 2020, the couple published a dizzying joint diary of a 16-month period of their working lives, when he was juggling work on the mini-series The Rook with trying to get his own film and theatre projects off the ground, and she was combining acting work with drafting and redrafting her adaptation of Life of Pi. “Half of my creative life is always taken over by my life as a mother,” wrote Chakrabarti. “My kids need structure and order [their daughters are now 18 and 20 years old], which seem in direct opposition to a freelance life… sometimes it seems like an impossible task.”
She was simultaneously working on a multidisciplinary adaptation of Italo Calvino’s fantastical travelogue Invisible Cities (premiered at the Manchester international festival in 2019), and a yet-to-be-released film version of her own hit play, Red Velvet, with Lester reprising the role of the African American actor Ira Aldridge, who caused a storm in 1833 when he took over from Edmund Kean in a West End production of Othello. She recalled redrafting the screenplay with notes Lester had given her. “He always looks at my writing with an actor’s eye but also a director’s one,” she wrote. “It’s very useful, because I come from an emotional logic rather than a visual one.”
With so many competing demands on her time, how does she primarily see herself? “I’ve always said I’m an actor first and then a writer, but this last year, because I haven’t managed to fit in much acting, I’ve been sort of begrudgingly saying: ‘I’m a writer and an actor,’ because the writing has come to me more easily.”
This is partly the time-old issue of age. When she was in her 20s, an older actor warned her that 30-50 was very hard for women in the theatre. “That was, like, half of my life ahead of me. And she was right, actually. I think things have changed in the past four or five years. But before that, people didn’t really know what to do with women; and then people of colour, that was a whole other thing.” Six years ago she played her first Shakespearean mother – Gertrude – to Tom Hiddleston’s Hamlet in a production that was one of 2017’s hottest tickets, staged by Kenneth Branagh to raise money for their alma mater, Rada. She’s 53 now. “I feel really lucky. I’m getting to tell some stories that I want to tell. And I get to put women on stage. I think I’m secretly writing for my 30- to 50-year-old self,” she says.
These are not career anxieties that afflict a novelist and memoirist such as O’Farrell, whose reputation has been growing with every novel. “You know, it’s funny, people often ask you about your career. And I always think: what career?” she says. “I think if you are attracted to being a writer, you’re not the kind of person who thinks that you have a career at all. I’ve always felt that the best book you’re going to write is the one you can’t not write – the one that’s the one that’s calling to you and tugging at your sleeve most insistently.”
Though Hamnet is now also being made into a film – details of which she is forbidden to reveal – she has never considered diversifying into scriptwriting. “As a novelist, I’m asking a reader to follow me through a forest, a bit like Hansel and Gretel, and I know how to leave a trail of visible breadcrumbs for the novel. But I wouldn’t know how to do that for an audience. I just don’t have those muscles.”
Watching rehearsals for the play had given her a new understanding of the significance of the term “playwright”, she adds. “It’s the same root as the word ‘wheelwright’, you know: this old fashioned work of making and creating something. There was this room full of people at the top of their game, not just actors, but lighting and movement and costume specialists. What fascinated me is the idea that it was a kind of call-and-response process. The play was being wrought right in front of us. It gives an insight into what Shakespeare himself did. He had an incredible company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men or the King’s Men, and they wrote the plays together. Seeing that echoed in what Lolita and Erica [Whyman, the director] and everybody else was doing was very moving.”
As Chakrabarti enters the final frenzy of bringing Agnes to life on stage, O’Farrell has retreated to her medicinal herb garden. “In fact, I was clearing it out over the weekend, and thinking: what am I going to grow this year? Because obviously it’s been very much in abeyance over the winter,” she says. “All your characters are part of you in a way, so is Agnes still with me? Definitely. And I hope she always will be.”
Hamnet is at the Swan theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1 April-17 June. Tickets for its transfer to the Garrick theatre, London WC2 (30 September–6 January 2024), go on sale 6 April
