Upstart Crow without the jokes: RSC’s Hamnet, at the Swan Theatre, reviewed

The Swan Theatre has reopened after an overhaul and praise god: they’ve replaced the seats. The Swan is a likeable theatre; the only space in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s portfolio that still conveys a real sense of history, though until 2020 that came at the price of acute posterior discomfort. No more: and we can get on with enjoying the inaugural production, an adaptation by Lolita Chakrabarti of Maggie O’Farrell’s Shakespeare novel Hamnet. It’s a nice fit, and after the RSC’s success with Wolf Hall you can see the logic. It’s Shakespearean without too much of that difficult Shakespeare, plus you get the built-in audience that comes with an award-winning novel.

If you’ve read the book, you’ll recognise the opening image in Erica Whyman’s production – a table of apples – but even if you haven’t, the Swan naturally suggests the 16th century. Meanwhile bees hum, birds sing and the countryside around Stratford seeps in through the theatre walls. It’s impossible to capture on stage the full sensory world of a novel as atmospheric as Hamnet but Tom Piper’s designs sketch a world of wooden beams and candlelit workshops. There’s a genuine feeling of a multi-generational family living in each others’ pockets, while the sighing viol and guitar of Oguz Kaplangi’s score evoke the period without pastiche.

Still, the problem with dramatising Hamnet isn’t what’s there, but what isn’t. It’s a story shaped around absence: of the title character (Shakespeare’s only son, who died in 1596); of Shakespeare himself, whose life’s work in London is glimpsed only briefly and uncomprehendingly by his Stratford family; and of the central figure, Anne (here Agnes) Hathaway, the wife whose absence from history lets O’Farrell create a believably complex might-have-been. But absence isn’t very visual. Chakrabarti’s adaptation straightens the novel’s knot-garden structure into a chronological narrative, and Whyman responds with vigorous, upfront direction.

It’s a valid approach, and Madeleine Mantock’s forthright Agnes is an unbreakable presence in a household dominated by the patriarch John (Peter Wight: a wounded bear of a man) and destabilised by the comings and goings of her ambitious husband William.