The Swan Theatre has reopened after an overhaul and praise god: they’ve replaced the seats. The Swan is a likeable theatre; the only space in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s portfolio that still conveys a real sense of history, though until 2020 that came at the price of acute posterior discomfort. No more: and we can
Maggie O Farrell s novel Hamnet was a lockdown bestseller about Shakespeare s home life, a book way more wrenching than any play about the Bard I ve ever seen.
Shakespeare’s wife moves centre stage in Lolita Chakrabarti’s pivotal adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, while urgent productions from two small London theatres tackle recent history head on