★★★✰✰
On the face of it, Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet is an adaptation of idle yet irresistible speculation. Is Shakespeare’s doomed, skull-cradling Danish prince not only a tragic figure in his own right, but no less than a personal exorcism for his creator? In the prince’s fevered contemplations of that sweet, dreamy sleep of death, is there a lament for the playwright’s own lost son embedded? As O’Farrell is quick to acknowledge within her author’s note, little is known of Hamnet Shakespeare, save for the fact that upon his death aged eleven, a burial was listed with no cause of death. Thus, in place of a life lived is an infinitely interpretable absence, young Hamnet rendered the ultimate muse in death. The boy’s short life is, effectively, subordinated to the legacy of a Great Man, felt only in the shadows it may or may not have cast on the Bard’s most beloved plays.
When viewed through this lens, the most remarkable thing about O’Farrell’s book is how thoroughly unremarkable the Shakespeare household seems within its pages. There is mother Agnes, consumed with the business of keeping a household with three children afloat. There is the eldest, Susanna, and twins Judith and Hamnet, partners in mischief and eerily alike in appearance. There are the children’s paternal grandparents, both unsparing in their words, but only the grandfather driven to violence by drink and sublimated self-hatred. For his part, the father of the three children is largely an absence, visible only in his letters from London, where he toils on a moneymaking endeavour largely mysterious to them. For long stretches, we could be reading of the daily struggles and small triumphs of any working-class family of the time. Furthermore, so captivatingly specific are the lesser known Shakespeares that we hope the Danish prince never arrives. After all, we’ve been told that story plenty of times before.
In many respects, Lolita Chakrabarti’s sturdy adaptation (which will complete its run at Stratford-Upon-Avon’s Swan Theatre on 17th June before heading to London’s Garrick Theatre on 30th September) retains some of this specificity, not least by way of its casting. Madeleine Mantock’s Agnes is equally flinty and warm, grounded and dreamily idealistic. To the extent that Hamnet’s central tragedy gets under our skin at all, it is due to the wrenching intensity the actress brings to the moment of the boy’s loss. No less strong is Alex Jarrett as Hamnet’s erstwhile twin, left with the unenviable guilt of having survived where her other half did not. Furthermore, director Erica Whyman and designer Tom Piper make bustlingly vivid the four walls in which the boy is to meet his end, even when inhabited by little more than a dinner table and twin ladders, snaking upwards to a moonlit canopy overlooking the stage.
Still, there’s something perhaps inescapably truncated about the stage Hamnet. Lost in translation is the crushing daily minutiae of grief, the bizarre act of continuing about one’s days and weeks and months in the wake of unspeakable, inexplicable loss. Some of O’Farrell’s most vivid passages trace little more than an accumulation of small domestic frustrations which, in the absence of a loved one, become devastating existential defeats. Even over the course of the play’s two hours and thirty minutes, the weighted exhaustion of time’s passage is never felt. Thus, it falls to the loss of Hamnet itself to fill these emotional gaps.
But the boy (Ajani Cabey) is ultimately a cipher, angelically doomed from the very beginning, and with few traits beyond that. Come the end of Hamnet the book, Hamlet the play feels like little more than a dramatic postscript to the all too real, much more mundane tragedy that preceded it. Additionally, those bearing the brunt of the loss have been imbued with vibrant, complex inner life. When the famed words of Shakespeare are spoken at the end of the stage Hamnet, they feel like the entire point. From our emotionally remote vantage, young Hamnet once again becomes the inspiration first, a personal loss second.
Words by Thomas Messner
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