Maggie O’Farrell’s multi-prize-winning novel about Shakespeare’s family has been adapted for the RSC by Lolita Chakrabarti and directed by Erica Whyman.
18-year-old William, a Latin tutor, living in Warwickshire, falls in love with illiterate Agnes, 8 years his senior, and has three children by her. Two of them are twins, Judith and Hamnet. It is Judith who gets ill first from the plague and seems to be at death’s door; but it is 11-year-old Hamnet who dies, not she.
Chakrabarti’s adaptation doesn’t really begin until after the interval when Shakespeare relocates to London and joins famed actor-manager Richard Burbage and Will Kempe, the great clown, to set up the Globe Theatre in Southwark. Agnes remains in Stratford, looking after the family.
Sadly, the play never comes to life in the way other recent plays and films about Shakespeare, such as Tom Stoppard’s Shakespeare in Love and Ben Elton’s Upstart Crow and All is True, have done. It’s all a bit dull.
Tom Varrey is a deliberately nondescript William. It is Madeleine Mantock as Agnes (better known as Ann Hathaway) who dominates the stage with her grief for the death of her son. Peter Wight has two roles: William’s father, a dreadful bully, and Will Kempe. Ajani Cabey is Hamnet.
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