Alas, poor Hamnet - it's a beautiful film but the storyline is utter tosh

Chloe Zhao's adaptation of the Maggie O'Farrell novel Hamnet has had rave reviews, so I could not wait to see it.

- BY AN WILSON

And it is a very beautiful film. The Forest of Arden shimmers and soughs, the unspoilt rural England in which Shakespeare grew up.

You probably know the story of O'Farrell's fantasy. William Shakespeare and his wife, Anne Hathaway, had three children: Susanna, the eldest, and twins: Hamnet, a boy, and Judith, a girl, named after their godparents, Stratford-upon-Avon's Mr and Mrs Bun the Bakers.

The only actor I liked in the film was Bodhi Rae Breathnach, who plays Susanna.

She reads to her younger sister from the sonnets and for once we hear Shakespeare's poetic voice really the only voice we care about. "And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence..." For the first, and only time, in the film, I turned to gooseflesh.

The premise of the novel is that Shakespeare, feeling grief for his son Hamnet, who has died from the plague at the age of 11, is so traumatised that he can never bring himself to mention plague or Black Death in all his copious oeuvre. His wife - in the film called Agnes, as she was named in her father's will is furious with him for being in London all the time. She has never been to the capital and never seen a play. Somehow, out of all this grief and pain, he constructs his most famous play, Hamlet. Agnes relents, comes to the Globe and is slowly won round to the magic of theatre.