Kemi-Bo Jacobs as Agnes, foreground, with Rory Alexander as William in Royal Shakespeare Company and Neal Street Productions’ “Hamnet,” which performs at American Conservatory Theater’s Toni Rembe Theater.
Kyle Flubacker/Royal Shakespeare Company and Neal Street Productions
If “Hamnet” is any indication, maybe the life of William Shakespeare should just stay a mystery.
Ponderous yet unassured, unmotivated yet generic, the stage adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s hit novel reads as a cynical IP money grab cranked through the widget factory.
“Hamnet”: Adapted by Lolita Chakrabarti from Maggie O’Farrell. Directed by Erica Whyman. Through May 24. Two hours, 30 minutes. $25-$130, subject to change. ACT’s Toni Rembe Theater, 415 Geary St., S.F. 415-749-2228. www.act-sf.org
The play reduces Shakespeare’s genius to the product of lived experience. Here, lines like “quintessence of dust” derive from something his wife said years ago, and “Hamlet” is mere grief therapy. Also, did you know that long-distance relationships are hard, that other endeavors are worthy besides writing canonical literature, and that Renaissance England could be hostile to free-spirited women?
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Royal Shakespeare Company and Neal Street Productions’ show, which opened Wednesday, April 22, at American Conservatory Theater’s Toni Rembe Theater, traffics in such non-insights.
One could argue that these same flaws bedevil Chloé Zhao’s Oscar-nominated film adaptation, which I very much liked. Like that movie, which garnered star Jessie Buckley an Academy Award, Lolita Chakrabarti’s playscript follows falconer, healer and herbalist Agnes (Kemi-Bo Jacobs) and Latin tutor-turned-playwright William (Rory Alexander) through their flirtation and shotgun marriage, through William’s move to London for his career and Agnes’ childbirths and mostly solo childrearing.
Heather Forster, left, as Eliza, and Kemi-Bo Jacobs as Agnes in “Hamnet.”
Kyle Flubacker/Royal Shakespeare Company and Neal Street Productions
But unlike the film version, the stage production under the direction of Erica Whyman whiffs on one emotional beat after another. Jacobs delivers every line like she’s King Lear raging at the storm during the heath scene. Alexander’s Shakespeare, meanwhile, gets mired when he performs Shakespearean verse and otherwise seems petulantly aloof, like he’s building a force field between himself and this play.
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Design is at cross-purposes with the show. A towering, multilevel wooden set resembling Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre barely gets used, almost like the actors have to work around it.
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Sound design by Simon Baker often recalls PC games circa 2002, as if a foreign army might come charging over a nonexistent battlement at any moment. Otherwise Baker’s plucky Spanish-sounding guitar undermines the dramaturgical reality and emotional poignancy of what could be the show’s rawest moments. The piped-in whispering of children also feels like a default choice that an AI-bot might suggest. String interludes likewise have all the soul of a microchip.
The whole thing has a connect-the-dots quality of a jukebox musical. From the few facts we know about Shakespeare’s life, it fills in the blanks. But it does so only with the least imaginative possibilities, like that Shakespeare was an angsty adolescent who says trite things to his adoring younger sister: “I write what I cannot say.”
Kemi-Bo Jacobs, left, as Agnes and Rory Alexander as William in “Hamnet.”
Kyle Flubacker/Royal Shakespeare Company and Neal Street Productions
This scattershot approach means, in traipsing through so many phases of the couple’s life, no single incident gets focus long enough to become meaningful and urgent. If everything’s just an elaborate setup for the last scene, where the illiterate Agnes finally journeys to London to see her husband’s work onstage for the first time, the play-in-a-play “Hamlet” we see just isn’t any good. It’s as if director and actors alike ran out of steam.
For many female fans, the “Hamnet” story has taken on symbolic weight, standing in for all the taken-for-granted housework, childrearing and emotional labor we do that make possible our husbands’ travels and grand schemes. It makes a case for female intuition as its own kind of artistic mysticism and for building a loving family as its own kind of masterpiece.
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But here, when Jacobs’ Agnes bellows “Where were you?” to Alexander’s William, her words sound hollow. After all, the whole conflict between Agnes and William is a shrug-inducing circumstance instead of a character-driven clash: She can’t move to London to be with him because the city air will be bad for their weakest child.
Frustrated women of the world should find their cri de coeur elsewhere. “Hamnet” is as shallow about us as it is about art.