An RSC stage version of Maggie O’Farrell’s bestselling novel ‘Hamnet’ was clearly always going to end up in the West End, and as it happens Lolita Chakrabarti’s adaptation has announced that it’s playing a limited 14-week West End run before its long-sold-out Stratford-upon-Avon run has even started.
The novel is both an imagining of the life and untimely death of William Shakespeare’s son Hamnet, as seen through the eyes of his mother Agnes – more commonly called Anne – and the story of Shakespeare and Agnes’s relationship, from meeting until the premiere of the greatest play ever written, named after their son.
Madeleine Mantock will star as Agnes in a production directed by Erica Whyman.
