Hamnet review: Maggie O’Farrell’s bestseller gets caught between raw power and Tudor twee

The RSC’s adaptation of this Women’s Prize-winning novel about Shakespeare’s son has the whiff of a naff heritage tourist attraction at the start – but the second act will break your heart

Tom Varey as the legendary Elizabethan playwright William Shakespeare (Manuel Harlan)

Maggie O’Farrell’s Women’s Prize-winning novel Hamnet persuasively needles at a mystery lodged at the heart of Shakespeare’s biography – his little-documented but seemingly strained relationship with his wife Anne Hathaway – and finds answers in the death of his young son. Staged by Royal Shakespeare Company current artistic director Erica Whyman, this story is an absorbing and emotive (if less than groundbreaking) plunge into the world of Tudor England.

O’Farrell’s book has a deeply satisfying multisensory quality to it, with her extensive historical research worn as lightly as the scent of the medicinal herbs that would have filled Hathaway’s house. Whyman’s production aims for the same sense-filling richness but, although Tom Piper’s wood-beamed set design has a welcome authenticity, other elements fall into the naff territory of a heritage tourist attraction: bursts of cod-Renaissance muzak jangle between scenes, the amplified whispers of children play over speakers, and everything’s lit in a lovely bright golden glow.

Still, adaptor Lolita Chakrabarti tells this story with such deftness that it’s hard not to be immersed in this world. She’s on home territory here – her past successes include another behind-the-scenes glimpse into thespian life, 2012’s Red Velvet – as she effortlessly captures the freighted camaraderie of actorly life. Tom Varey gives young Shakespeare an intriguing vulnerability as he jostles with bumptious, scene-stealing comic actor Will Kempe (Peter Wight) and ambitious actor-manager Richard Burbage (Will Brown), as they risk everything on setting up their theatre in scandalous Southwark.

Shakespeare’s home life is even more compelling. The mysterious Anne (more properly known here by her full name Agnes) is a wild thing he finds in the forest, hunting with her kestrel, delighting in its kills. Then, she’s caught herself, into a married life where her roamings are looked upon with suspicion by her extended family – even if the herbal concoctions she brews heal their ailments. Madeleine Mantock shines with an otherworldly brightness in this role. She loses touch with reality and her prized son, but never becomes pitiable, even as she’s haunted by things past and gone.

Hamnet is a play that achieves something that every historical drama strives for: it shows you a world where people don’t just dress and act differently, but understand the world differently. Ghosts are a part of ordinary life here, a way of coping with grief in a world where plague and illness are constant visitors. And if Hamnet’s first act periodically descends into romanticised Tudor twee, its second act is utterly heartbreaking as it captures the emotional intensity of a whole family battling the horrors of death as one, an endless fire burning to smoke out the sickness.

William (Tom Varey) and Agnes (Madeleine Mantock) in ‘Hamnet’ (Manuel Harlan)

It’s almost incomprehensible that Shakespeare’s response to such horrors was to write The Comedy of Errors, a wilfully silly farce infested with identical twins and bad puns. But people are complicated. And Hamnet shows that Shakespeare compartmentalised his life as a way of coping, retreating away from his wife yet drawing on his suppressed pain to write his most haunting passages. It’s a moving commentary on his life, one that restores the family life that has slipped out of his story to its rightful, central place.

Garrick Theatre, until 17 February