Preview: Acclaimed Hamnet Moves From Page to Screen to Stage in U.S. Debut at Chicago Shakespeare

The Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Hamnet makes its U.S. premiere at Chicago Shakespeare Theater this week—but the title is already a familiar one.

Book lovers know that Hamnet originated as the bestselling novel by Maggie O'Farrell, named for William Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son who died of the plague and may have inspired his father’s longest play, Hamlet. (The names were interchangeable at the time.) O’Farrell’s novel won numerous awards, including the Women's Prize for Fiction and National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

For cinephiles, the recent film adaptation of Hamnet comes to mind, having just won this year’s Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture and being nominated for a Best Film Oscar. Third Coast Review’s Steve Prokopy called it one of the best films of 2025.

And of course, there’s the already-storied history of the stage adaptation itself. Under the direction of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC) then acting artistic director Erica Whyman, Hamnet played to sold-out audiences in William Shakespeare’s hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon in 2023, breaking box office records at the Swan Theatre before transferring to the West End with fanfare.

Whyman, who also directs the touring production, advocated for RSC to bring Hamnet to the stage and felt this “novel of the plague” (as the book is subtitled) was especially relatable due to its timely release in 2020.

“I read the novel in Stratford-upon-Avon during the pandemic,” Whyman said in a recent interview. “So I was blown away by its exquisite and devastating portrayal of grief, of change and of the power of theater to transform. It was immediately clear to me that it would be thrilling to bring it to the stage, partly because it describes a whole community invested in and then pole-axed by one family’s loss, and partly because it is a story of the theater, as a place of creative refuge, and one where audiences can see themselves stunningly reflected.”

Award-winning playwright and actor Lolita Chakrabarti adapted Hamnet for RSC. Chicago audiences may remember Chakrabarti’s play Hymn, which ran at Chicago Shakespeare last spring. She also adapted Yann Martel’s Booker-prize winning novel Life of Pi, which played to acclaim on the West End and Broadway.

Hamnet is rich with the interior lives of its characters, especially Agnes (Anne) Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife. Chakrabarti described this interiority as something that can be portrayed very theatrically off the page.

“Some of the interiority of Agnes is her sixth sense,” Chakrabarti said. “In a book that’s delicious, because we’re in her head and experience it with her. I combined three different people I knew…. one was schizophrenic, and there’s all the complexities of that, but also that sense of hearing voices and trying to work out what’s real and what isn’t. And then I took a friend of mine who was psychic, and told me how when she discovered her gift—it sounded really creepy!—she woke up one morning and there were three people at the bottom of her bed. But they were clothed in sort of Medieval garb, so she was like, Oh my god, what’s going on? Slowly she realized this was her gift, people would arrive to tell her something. And finally, these are not people I knew, but the witches in Macbeth—I thought of that premonition, that kind of dealing in darkness, the witchery that was an obsession of Shakespeare’s time. I combined all those elements, which are very theatrical in themselves, to express some of the interiority of the book.”

Whyman noted the nuanced portrait of Agnes in Hamnet is especially meaningful against the backdrop of how women in Shakespeare’s plays and life have historically been portrayed.

“We have this astonishing portrait of humanity across his 37 or so plays. So we remain curious and excited by glimpses and imaginings of who might have been, given he appears to see us so vividly 400 years after he died,” Whyman said. “At the same time, we have spent hundreds of years marginalizing or caricaturing the story of the women both in his plays and in his life, and Anne, or Agnes has been especially reduced by commentators. Hamnet restores her story to center stage, and in doing so you see his plays and characters through the lens of a rich, loving, tragic and resilient family life.”

Chakrabarti’s adaptation process for Hamnet began with taking a highlighter to the text to note what might be useful from a dramatic, philosophical, situational, or dialogue standpoint. “It’s terrible, you shouldn’t write in books,” she explained, “but I only write in them when I’m adapting them, I’ve made that rule!” Only after finishing the play did she consult with O’Farrell, who provided notes on later drafts that were “very particular and specific and brilliant from all of her research and knowledge,” Chakrabarti said. She also conducted on-the-ground research herself.

“I live in London, so I had a Shakespeare adviser. We went around the South Bank, around Bankside and the Globe and the areas around the river, Suffolk Cathedral. And I went to Stratford-upon-Avon and walked around Shakespeare’s home and the area, Anne Hathaway’s home and Shakespeare’s school. Just walking down the streets gives you such a flavor of people rather than ‘iconic literary figure,’” Chakrabarti said.