Shakespeare is a hard sell at school. When I was studying English Literature in the nineteen-eighties, before the days of event cinema, attending a live performance was unthinkable. Nowadays, the Playhouse frequently screens one or other of his plays from National Theatre Live and the Royal Shakespeare Company. There is a widely held belief that William Shakespeare is both high-brow and the most significant British person ever to have lived; there are even conspiracy theories about him. And undoubtedly “Hamlet” is the most-quoted work in, and the most powerful contributor to, the English language.
The story of “Hamnet” (Universal), showing now at the Montrose Playhouse, is weaved, “Jack and the Beanstalk”-style, between the composition of “Hamlet,” the play, in about the year 1600, and the scourge of childhood deaths in poor, isolated, rural communities. The filmmakers’ technique of slowing certain moments of the drama right down serves to manipulate the audience’s emotional response and ratchet up the tension. A Wikipedia page devoted to “Hamnet” describes it as a “largely fictional story,” not that it makes any difference if it is true or false. Act One opens as a love story. Will, played by Paul Mescal, who is tutoring “Latin for boys who will be naught but sheep farmers,” meets Agnes, played by Jessie Buckley, who “keeps running off to the forest like a gypsy.” Very quickly, she becomes pregnant; “The child in her belly,” a family member challenges Will, “did you put it there?” In this first act, the filmmakers keep returning to riff on two insights from early-seventeenth-century Britain. First, that people were so poor—quite aside from the devastation of maternal and infant death. What was there to do? With whom to talk? With what to entertain children? How about ourselves? And second, that it was so dark. “Hamnet” thoughtfully walks us around rooms lit by candlelight alone. One scene where Will (I use the name Agnes uses for him throughout) is whittling a new quill pen—with which to write lines for “Romeo and Juliet”—is shot from the position that the candle would be in relation to the desk. (There is a scene much later where Will walks through London at twilight which is similarly impressive.) The poverty of rural life is stultifying Will’s intellectual energy and his ambition. “Agnes,” Will says, “I just need to work.” “He’s angry with himself,” Agnes says, justifying his unstoppable decamp to unhealthy, sulphurous, smoky London. “He’s sick with himself.” But there is also joy; as Will struggles with his (now famous) meter and rhythm, he is rapturous with his handiwork, and in a short, neat, and very effective scene his children dress up as the three witches from “Macbeth” and perform the play’s well-known opening lines to enthral their mum.
Will becomes an absentee father; Act Two is devoted to maternity and motherhood. By now there are three children; an older girl and twins, one boy—Hamnet—and one girl. When childhood disease strikes, in the form of bubonic plague, there are no doctors, no antibiotics and no chances. “Go and find your grandmother,” Agnes says. “Bid her to come.” As often as not the uncluttered screenplay shows us acceptance, inevitability, fatalism; “What is given may be taken away.” Irrespective of whether the story is true, there is an awe-inspiring example of truth in filmmaking when Agnes’s older daughter cries, “Can’t you see that it’s too late for him?” The sudden slackening of the tension, the split-second shutoff of the music, the absolute silence, the spellbound audience; it is transcendent filmmaking. When Will bursts home to find a dead son, he tells Agnes, “You did everything you could.” Mr Mescal eases back the motion of the muscles of his face. “Everything,” he whispers. “Everything.” “Everything.”
But Will has to leave. “The world will simply not stand still, Agnes,” he says. As they fight behind the long kitchen table, broken egg shells in the foreground like in a still-life painting, the camera stands stock still then fades to complete blackness—end of Act Two. The final act opens with Mr Mescal pacing up and down, and up and down, and up and down. He is rehearsing his own hard-fought lines with stroppy, lifeless actors. “Again,” he demands, “Again.” “Again.” “Again.” Finally, “Hamlet” is ready for its premiere at the Globe outdoor theatre. A scene in which the cinema audience watches actors watching actors is tricky to get right. Here, the natural arrangement of the theatre, which doesn’t have any seating in the area where we would expect to find the stalls, so that the audience stands on the ground pressed up to the stage, is exploited with deft result. Agnes stands up front, the edge of the stage at the level of her elbows, looking up at the actors (and they down on her). As the camera slows to linger on Agnes as the tragedy unfolds, we can admire the complete range of Ms Buckley’s facial expression. Will watches from stage left—he has invested everything he has into this moment and he has created a smash hit. Twenty-year-old Noah Jupe plays the very first Hamlet and wins over his audience, who, in a beautiful cinematic touch, reach out their hands to try to save him. The same device of slow motion dialog is used to emphasise the final union of the twin tragedies.
Filmmakers, like theatre directors, seem to think that jarring upper-class English accents impress the audience. But why insist on this if the thread weaved through the whole enterprise is of rural poverty? It reinforces a thoroughly regrettable impression given by elements of British theatre that only the well-to-do are invited.
Still, we are all invited to the Playhouse on 22nd and 25th January for “Hamlet” from NT Live. What a great opportunity to take pupils, children or grandchildren at the Montrose Academy for an expedition which will stay with them. Will brought forth a masterpiece which will long outlast any of us. His urgent determination is to the benefit of all. “I have to go,” he says. “You understand.”
Adam Poole
9th January 2026
If you are interested in viewing this screening, please book your tickets here
