Hamnet Is Now a Hit Film, But It Was Actually a Play First

With two major Golden Globe wins and eight 2026 Academy Award nominations, Hamnet is one of the buzziest movies of this year’s film awards circuit. Based on Maggie O’Farrell’s bestselling 2020 novel, the Chloé Zhao-directed drama expands on the scant historical records about William Shakespeare to imagine a fictionalized version of the playwright’s family life, drawing a direct connection between the actual death of his young son, Hamnet, and the creation of his famous tragedy, Hamlet.

More than two years before Hamnet made it to the big screen, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) premiered a stage adaptation in Stratford-upon-Avon, the English town where Agnes (also known as Anne) Hathaway married Shakespeare and raised their three children. Adapted by Lolita Chakrabarti and directed by Erica Whyman, the 2023 production later transferred to London’s West End. This month, the production launches a U.S. tour, premiering at Chicago Shakespeare Theater (February 10–March 8) followed by stops in Washington, DC, and San Francisco.

Whyman, who joined the RSC as deputy artistic director in 2013, served as its acting artistic director from 2021 to 2023, so she was shepherding the prestigious theatre through pandemic closures when she first encountered O’Farrell’s Hamnet. Like many who read the book while sheltering from COVID-19, she found its themes of illness and loss both poignant and timely, especially since she was living in Stratford-upon-Avon with a daughter who was nearly Hamnet’s age at the time.

Immediately seeing its potential as a theatrical piece, Whyman inquired about the stage rights, which initially were tied to the film rights but were released after O’Farrell lent her support to an RSC adaptation. When Chakrabarti—an accomplished British actress and Olivier Award-winning playwright—agreed to write the script, the play was underway.

Two of Chakrabarti’s previous plays, Life of Pi and Invisible Cities, are also based on novels, so the adaptation process wasn’t new for her. “My starting point for doing an adaptation is that I have to love the story and love how it’s told to me, because then I can take that feeling and run with it,” she told Playbill. “Maggie O’Farrell let me into a world that I felt like I had studied and knew, but I walked into it through her book.”

Instead of alternating between timelines as the novel does, Chakrabarti’s play moves chronologically from the first meeting of Agnes and William—played by Kemi-Bo Jacobs and Rory Alexander in the touring production— through Hamlet’s premiere at London’s Globe Theatre. The stage version also gives William a more co-equal role than in the novel, which focuses on Agnes’ rich interior life while leaving the Bard himself in the periphery. “For the play,” says Chakrabarti, “I thought William was really key, because in order to tell the story of how this loss of their son then led him to write Hamlet, the play, he needed to be part of the story.”

As a fictionalized account of this creative process, the script weaves in phrases, images, and character types that are recognizable from Shakespeare’s canon. “It’s a love letter to his work, his writing, his influences, his story,” says Chakrabarti. Though most of the plot takes place before William’s rise to fame, a future in the theatre beckons even as he toils in his father’s glove shop.

Despite William’s expanded role in the stage version, the story is also “very much about how the women, all the women in that family, survive these events,” notes Whyman. “Great swathes of this story are carried by women: nursing, midwifery, making households work, holding each other up.”

Chakrabarti’s adaptation portrays Agnes, William, and their children as a family of mixed ethnic heritage, an artistic choice that complements O’Farrell’s depiction of Agnes as an outsider in her community. While the diversity of 16th- and 17th-century London is widely acknowledged in Shakespearean studies and performance practices, this topic is underexplored in regard to rural locales. “Lolita was very interested in the Midlands of England,” relates Whyman. “It would have been more diverse in terms of ethnic background than any of us imagined.”

With its focus on the family life of a great playwright, Hamnet is an inherently theatrical story that lands differently onstage than in other formats. While reading a book is a “very personal affair” and watching a film offers intimate close-ups of actors, being in the theater puts audience members “in a room with the characters,” says Chakrabarti. “In the theater, you will meet the Shakespeares in a way that you don’t in the book or the film.”