“Grief fills the room up of my absent child.”
(William Shakespeare, King John, Act III scene iv)
Irish theatre collective Dead Centre’s new solo work for an eleven-year-old boy is devoted to Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, who died in 1596 at the age of eleven. His father, the famous poet who had abandoned his family and was pursuing his theatre career far away from his family, was unable to get back to Stratford-upon-Avon in time to see his child one last time before he died. In 1599 Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. A single letter separates Hamnet from the philosophical heights of Hamlet. Unlike the Prince, he cannot ask ‘to be or not to be’. Condemned not to be, he now seeks to understand the world from which he has been wrested. While waiting for a visit from his father – a visit that may never happen – all he has are the plays to act as a surrogate parent. But what is Shakespeare telling us? How to be? Or how not to be? Hamnet is too young to understand Shakespeare. We are too old to understand Hamnet. Youth reaching forward to a life it will never know, an audience reaching back to a life it has forgotten. Two generations, asking each other what they want to pass on and receive.
