Hamnet, a play with a plague-driven plot, is the first opening at the Swan since the pandemic closure. Not since Matilda has there been such a female-centred production at the RSC. Rarely has there been a drama that looked so firmly into the 21st century without losing the S in RSC. Or one that, using – hurrah – locally inflected accents, drew directly on Shakespeare’s home town.
This is not the best play ever seen at Stratford – that might after all be Hamlet. Yet though not always fully charged with power, Lolita Chakrabarti’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel is pivotal. O’Farrell’s absorbing book shows Shakespeare’s imagination infiltrated by family and female life. The most striking literary conclusion is that the playwright was driven to write Hamlet by the death from plague of his 11-year-old son, Hamnet. As important is the notion that the intelligence of his wife, Agnes (not Ann) Hathaway, has been underestimated because not literary, and that her influence was pervasive – not least in the language of flowers and herbs used by the bereft Ophelia.
