News about Lolita Chakrabarti

Kathryn Flett is captivated by BBC2's Shakespeare: Rise Of A Genius, which was created to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's First Folio's publication. She is also a huge fan of Aussie drama The Newsreader, and Chanel 5's Wife on Strike is equally convincing.

Maggie O'Farrell's book Hamnet was a lockdown bestseller about Shakespeare's domestic life, a book far more tragic than any Shakespeare's home life, which was much more disturbing than any play about the Bard I've ever seen. The RSC was supposed to stage it, with the theatre's door in Stratford (mostly) on the theatre's doorstep. Agnes Hathaway, also known as Anne, is the subject of this tale: a woman who was portrayed as the great man's shrewish wife is introduced as the great man's mistress. Here she has been regained, as both a witchy free spirit and a hard-pressed mother. In an apple shed, she and William have a baby. Twins are following. In a household that is under Shakespeare's tyranny (played with an enthralling gaze by Peter Wight), she raises the children, two girls and a boy.

GEORGINA BROWN: Another week in the theatre, another adaptation of a novel. But Lolita Chakrabarti's deft distillation of Maggie O'Farrell's award-winning Hamnet - an imagined glimpse of Shakespeare's family life over the past 18 years - becomes something new and exciting. It's abridged down to just over two hours, but it does give a glimpse at Shakespeare's unhearded and unknown women, as well as how the playwright's personal lives were integrated into his performances. Hamnet's greatest tragedy, in particular, was his ferocious mourning over his son's death, which was buried a stone's throw away from the newly renovated Swan Theatre. That comes in the play's more dramatic second half. For the novel's dutifully, but magnificently, adhering faithfully to the story, despite enforcing a straightforward chronology beginning in 1582, it comes to an end.