Hamnet review: ‘beautifully acted’ but doesn’t ‘pierce the heart’

Swan Theatre reopens with stage adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s bestselling novel

Tom Varey (William) and Madeleine Mantock (Agnes) in Hamnet
Tom Varey (William) and Madeleine Mantock (Agnes) in Hamnet
(Image credit: Manuel Harlan © RSC)

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 playwright’s courtship and marriage to Agnes (aka Anne) Hathaway, and the death of their 11-year-old son, Hamnet. Tom Piper’s design – with its “wooden beams and ladders, wheat sheaves, lavender and rosy apples” – turns “bewitchingly” from “a rustic home to the wooden O of the Globe Theatre”, and the action is garlanded by Oguz Kaplangi’s folksy music. In this “soft-focus version”, some of “the texture and particularity of O’Farrell’s writing” is lost, but this “historical-biographical fantasia” will still “win plenty of hearts”.

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