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.