W
hen the Royal Shakespeare Company’s sell-out production of Hamnet transfers to the West End this week, Madeleine Mantock will be called upon to break audiences’ hearts eight times a week. “On matinee days I have six births and two deaths to get through,” she laughs. “Just the six.”
We meet during rehearsals for the transfer of the, show based on Maggie O’Farrell’s best-selling 2020 novel, to the Garrick Theatre. Wearing shorts, Birkenstocks and a white shirt, the actor is a bright, funny, vivacious interviewee.
This is only her second stage role – she made her debut in the West End opposite Jennifer Saunders in Blithe Spirit –but when Hamnet opened at the Swan theatre, Stratford in February, critics called her performance “outstanding” and “luminous”, meaning Mantock, who grew up north of Nottingham, is set to return triumphant to the West End.
In the novel, adapted for the stage by Lolita Chakrabarti (Red Velvet, Hymn, Life of Pi), Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway is called Agnes. In the course of her research, O’Farrell read Richard Hathaway’s will which referenced “My daughter Agnes”, and the Hamnet author wrote “we may have been calling her the wrong name for all this time”.
We see Agnes fall in love, marry and have three children, while her brilliant husband decamps to London for a life in the theatre. Then, riven by grief after the death of their son Hamnet, who succumbed to the plague aged 11 (a tragedy which later inspires Shakespeare to write the play Hamlet), she battles to hold their family together.
Read More
Rachell Smith
“You’ve got two people who have come from really tense and often violent family situations, who meet each other, fall in love, defy the odds and make this happy little path for them to go down. And so when it all goes wrong, we really feel what they’ve lost,” Mantock says. “But I love that, because it feels true to life; I get to play joy and sadness and those different feelings’.”
The play is named after Shakespeare’s lost boy, but there is little doubt who is the star of the show: grounded but otherworldly (Agnes has second sight and is a healer), the playwright’s wife runs rings around her husband, and everyone else.
In her first scene, Mantock plays her as a tomboy in jerkin and trousers, flying a kestrel. Shakespeare (played by Tom Varey) even mistakes her for a boy. Mantock relishes the fact that Agnes now has a voice, instead of, as has happened in the past, being dismissed by scholars as a nag and a shrew, who tricked Shakespeare (eight years younger) into marriage by getting pregnant.
She was hooked immediately by Chakrabarti’s script. “If I read something and get really emotional, I have that ‘whoosh’ feeling,” she says. “I thought: ‘OK, I’ll go in and do my best.’ I normally work on screen so theatre is not necessarily my comfort zone.”
Director Erica Whyman and her casting director Amy Ball invited Mantock to workshop scenes with them. “Eventually I met Lolita. And it was quite daunting, because she’s the person reading with me. I thought, ‘Oh, you’ve written this and you’re looking me dead in the eye.’ But they were just lovely every step of the way.”
Tom Varey, who plays William, with Madeleine Mantock as Agnes
/ Manuel HarlanMantock, 33, doesn’t have children and did initially worry about playing a mother. “We’ve got a 20-minute interval break and then suddenly I’m over 40 with three children. Who’s going to believe me?” The children are played by 20-something actors too. “In real life, they’re grown up; they vape,” she laughs.
Mantock, who has Jamaican heritage, identifies as half Afro-Caribbean, half Caucasian. In the play, all the Hathaways are played by actors of mixed heritage. “Somebody said, ‘Are we acknowledging race?’ And I think from Lolita’s research, she discovered that at this time, there were people from everywhere all over the country, especially in London, but that actually the group that people native to England would have discriminated against were the Europeans. They were the people they didn’t like or trust,” she says.
“For Will and Agnes’s families, it’s not so much race that’s the problem, it’s more the religious element of who’s still secretly a Catholic, and who’s not. And also, yes, Agnes’s family are a bit different. They suspect her of being a witch. So that sense of being ‘other’, whether or not you feel like you are, and then how the rest of the community treats you, definitely threads through the play.”
The cast of Hamnet
/ Manuel HarlanMantock is critical of limited diversity in theatre — and wants to see representation go even further. “I want us to have a love interest or a beautifully, wonderful, desired woman be the darkest person you’ve ever seen. I want there to be plus-sized women… I want us to explore what it’s like to have a disability or what it’s like to be trans in this world,” she has said.
Today she mentions how Idris Elba has commented that he would rather not be called a black actor. “I guess the difference is that until we start saying, ‘White actor Ben Whishaw’…” she pauses, carefully. “But it’s when you’re constantly being othered and put into this other bracket where it’s like, ‘Oh, you’re different from the norm that we’ve set’ – I think that’s why people get fed up with it.”
She speaks warmly of their little Hamnet “family”. Since the play finished at Stratford, they’ve attended festivals together and had riotous nights out. She’s slightly miffed that Tom Varey went to see Barbie without her. “ So I went to Guys and Dolls without him. I was like: ‘Well, you Barbied’.”
From childhood Mantock knew she wanted to perform – Goldie Hawn and French & Saunders were her heroines – but it seemed an impossible dream. “Where I grew up there were hairdressers, chip shops and miners’ welfare centres. In terms of [the entertainment] industry or culture, there wasn’t anything,” she says.
“But I started to go to gymnastics because I was doing handstands on the sofa all the time. My mum was like: ‘You need to do that somewhere else.’ After that my dad, who is a personal trainer, knew a lady who ran a dance school, so I started to go there. I remember age 10 doing a slow dance – a lot of performers experience this feeling where you’re so connected to your body and what you’re doing, but you’re also completely removed from it, and it’s like this euphoric thing.”
A performer called Jordi Guitart visited her school to do a masterclass. “And that was the first time I knew it was a job. And I remember saying, ‘Well, I’m going to do that.’ Everybody said, ‘Nobody gets to do it full-time’. But I was like, ‘No, if only a few people get to do it, I’ll be one of the few.’ I was a bit obnoxious and quite set that somehow I would succeed,” she smiles. “And I kept that mentality for the rest of my childhood, and then it all became about – like Shakespeare in the play – how do I get to London?”
She studied musical theatre at Arts Ed in Chiswick. Before Hamnet, Mantock primarily worked in TV. She had roles in Casualty, Debbie Horsfield’s Age Before Beauty and Into The Badlands. Then in 2018, she was cast in the girl-power reboot of Charmed, about three sisters who discover they are witches. She relocated to LA, attracted by the concept of a prime-time show with three non-white female leads.
Her 20s were spent in hotels and rented apartments, missing friends’ birthdays and weddings. So she’s thrilled to be back in west London permanently. “In LA, I’d go to get oysters on my own, have a nice dinner, go to bed, go to work next day. That’s what my life was like so, yeah, this feels a bit more like living,” she grins.
On Blithe Spirit she was so in awe of Saunders she avoided her. “She’s quite shy. But I kind of felt she wanted to know who I was, and what I was about. And so to be honest, I ignored her. It felt like she wanted to be left alone and didn’t want anyone to smother her. So I thought, ‘OK, I’ll just leave her be.’ So I made friends with other people and then eventually she came to me and I was like: ‘OK, Jennifer wants to be my friend’.”
Saunders is “definitely one of those people who wants to chat and get to know you and have a naughty dirty joke. But she really cares about the craft as well.”
When she heard Hamnet was transferring, Mantock assumed a bigger name would play Agnes in the West End. “To be honest, my first thought was: ‘Well, we won’t be there’,” she laughs. And waiting for the transfer has been hard. “It’s really weird when you’ve suddenly got nowhere to be every day. Me and another cast member described it as like having an old iPhone in the drawer and it just won’t quite recharge to its fullest level. I was a bit frustrated with myself. I was like: ‘Alright enough now, let’s get on with it.’”
She went on holiday, watched a lot of theatre. Boxing became a new passion. “I’m finding a mind-body connection with it, which is what I always loved about dance.”
Despite the glamour of life in LA, you sense she’s addicted to the “collaborative control” theatre offers. “As an actor on screen, you show up that day and shoot what you’ve been given. And then they cut it to pieces. I mean, that is part of the magic of screen that you’re able to do that in the edit and tweak the story as you go along. But as the actor, you don’t have any say in that. And I’ve definitely had experiences where I’ve been asked to do things, especially when you’re doing network television, where you’ve got 22 episodes, and you’re going: “Ooh but in season two, Episode Six, I was really against that. And now you want me to stand for it!’”
Each performance of Hamnet is subtly different, even when it comes to the audience. She can always tell when a book group is in the theatre – ‘They’ll be cheering on Agnes. But if it’s a school party of teenage girls, William is king of the show. And I’m like: ‘OK, cool. you get that one.’”
Hamnet is at the Garrick Theatre from 30 September; buy tickets here
https://www.standard.co.uk/culture/theatre/madeleine-mantock-hamnet-shakespeare-west-end-maggie-ofarrell-b1110139.html
