Date/Time: Thursday, 18th January 2024 at 14:30 - 17:00
Location: Garrick Theatre, 2 Charing Cross Road, London, WC2H 0HH
Price: £52 per person. Member and guest £104. Face value £97pp
Event Organiser: Pete Wells. 7, Wayfaring Court, Safflower Lane, Romford RM3 0LQ
It is not only the tragically short life of William Shakespeare’s son that lies at the heart of Maggie O’Farrell’s award-winning novel, Hamnet, but also that of his wife, Agnes Hathaway, of whom so little is known.
Agnes is the focus of Lolita Chakrabarti’s (Life of Pi, Red Velvet, Hymn) light but slick adaptation of the novel. A natural healer, clairvoyant and illiterate, we are taken from her first meeting with a teenage William – a Latin tutor and wastrel in his bullying father’s eyes – to their marriage and grief in the aftermath of Hamnet’s death.
The first half focuses on their love story and the births of the children, Susanna, and twins, Judith and Hamnet. The second jumps by over a decade to 1596 when Judith is taken ill with the bubonic plague and, just as she recovers, Hamnet, who has been closely caring for her, falls fatally ill from contagion at the age of 11.
When the plague steals 11-year-old Hamnet from his loving parents, they must each confront their loss alone. And yet, out of the greatest suffering, something of extraordinary wonder is born.
The production builds its emotive power in the second half and shows Agnes and William dealing with grief in very different ways, Agnes unravelling into lamentation and paralysing depression, William into horrified silence. We see him escaping to London to immerse himself in work, although it is through his playwriting that his grief finds expression, as Agnes discovers movingly at the end.
We end with Hamlet – Shakespeare’s homage to Hamnet – and it all stays as sweeping and sentimental as a Hollywood film but hooks us in nonetheless, strongly performed across the board, with a simple, beguiling theatricality. It is a rather broad-brush portrait of the Shakespeares’ grief, but knows just how to pull at our heartstrings all the same.
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