RSC's "Hamnet" is the thing at Shakespeare Theatre Company

Kemi-Bo Jacobs (Agnes Hathaway) and Rory Alexander (William Shakespeare) in Hamnet, Royal Shakespeare Company, at Shakespeare Theatre Company. Photo: Kyle Flubacker

For the first time in Shakespeare Theatre Company's history, the company is hosting a production and cast from Royal Shakespeare Company. The British troupe's intriguing staging of Hamnet, Lolita Chakrabarti's adaptation of the recent novel by Maggie O'Farrell, opened this week at Harman Hall, seen Friday evening. Those who have seen the recent film adaptation of this story about William Shakespeare and his family, directed by Chloé Zhao, know that Shakespeare's wife, named Agnes Hathaway in the story (a version of her name found in some official documents), is depicted as a mystical figure adept at herbal cures and second sight. Chakrabarti adds the additional twist that she is black, and her children with Shakespeare bi-racial. (A program essay by Farah Karim-Cooper, recently appointed director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, examines the historical evidence of such multiculturalism in Tudor England.)

Though not historically accurate in terms of Shakespeare's family, neither is O'Farrell's basic premise, that Shakespeare wrote his play Hamlet as a way to mourn the death of his son with Hathaway, the twin named Hamnet. Shakespeare did have twins named Judith and Hamnet, and the latter died at age 11 during an outbreak of the bubonic plague. (Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate, who sees no connection between Shakespeare's son and his most famous play, has speculated instead that Twelfth Night, with its story of fraternal twins reunited after a tragic separation, has a more plausible resonance with the story of Shakespeare and his children.)

The cast in this production is uniformly excellent, beginning with the believable chemistry between Kemi-Bo Jacobs's proud Agnes and Rory Alexander's writing-obsessed William. The children, played by Ajani Cabey (Hamnet), Saffron Dey (Judith), and Ava Hinds-Jones (the elder sister, Susanna), add poignant and sometimes mysterious touches to the play. Some of the strongest performances came in the supporting cast, beginning with the fierce, even horrifying mothers of Penny Layden (Mary Arden, Shakespeare's mother) and Nicky Hobday (Joan, Agnes's stepmother). Nigel Barrett is imposing as Shakespeare's abusive father, John, but equally humorous as Will Kempe, one of the players in Shakespeare's company.

Appropriately this theatrical adaptation draws more connections to other Shakespeare plays than the movie. Another twin-centered play, The Comedy of Errors, made a hilarious appearance, as did a touching reference to the grief of Laertes, who crawls into the grave with the coffin of his sister, Ophelia, in Hamlet: Alexander's Shakespeare did something similar when Hamnet was buried in the play. A number of references to the horrors of acting indoors, with a crowd of people all on top of one another, got some solid laughs. The bare set of wooden beams, ladders, and upper levels (sets and costumes by Tom Piper) suggests both the various homes in Stratford and the structure of the Globe. Music and sound (designed by Simon Baker) and atmospheric lighting (Prema Mehta) helped create some of the story's more mysterious moments.

Hamnet runs through April 12 at Harman Hall. shakespearetheatre.org