What better way to mark the quadricentennial of Shakespeare’s death than to engage with a play called Shakespeare’s Will – performed in the Gothic Revival ambience of Old St Paul’s: a Colonial timber structure with back-lit stained-glass window tableaux that take us back a couple of thousand years. As with Will’s plays, his wife Anne Hathaway’s lesser-known story resonates through time and space to spark recognition and empathy in all who bear witness to it.  

The will Bill (as she calls him) left is indeed what the play foreshadows and ends with. En route, however, from their market-place meeting – she’s 26, he’s 18 – to his death at almost 52, it is his wilfulness in pursuing his career and neglecting his wife and children that informs the form and pressure of Anne’s flashback-laced monologue.

Canadian playwright Vern Thiessen confesses to having played “fast and loose with the will and its meaning”, using it “as a springboard for my own imagination and artistic goal – to explore the journey of a woman who faces adversity, rises above it and ultimately rekindles life in herself.” In this he emulates Shakespeare, the consummate springboard exponent, although Thiessen confines himself to prose, amusingly making Anne eloquent and ‘Bill’ monosyllabic, in conversing with – and later writing to – her, at least. It’s a good joke to call him “a man of few words.”  

Thiessen does reveal Will’s early proficiency with the quill by inserting the relatively clumsy ‘Sonnet 145’, aligning with the theory that this was written for Anne, as proved by the pun on Hathaway in the final couplet:
    ‘I hate’ from hate away she threw,
    And saved my life, saying – ‘not you.’ 
Apart from his reading that aloud, “One day I shall write better,” is the longest sentence we hear Will speak to Anne.

With well-centred introspection and quiet wit in a good West-Midlands accent, Suzy Sampson (NZ-born, London-, LA- and NYC-trained) draws us into Anne’s reality as a strong-willed woman who goes and gets pregnant to the fresh-faced young son of a glove-maker. There is insight and humour in her vocal depictions of Bill, her long-suffering father and her inquisitive children – Susanna and the twins, Judith and Hamnet – each with a distinct personality.

Changes of frock from black to green and back to black, and time in her white undergarments too, vary the visuals in the simple setting. As directed by Robert Tsonos (also Canadian), there is a bit too much purposeless wandering back and forth across the stage for my liking but it does allow for points to be emphasised through stillness.

From time to time pen-and-wash pictures of late 16^th century Stratford-upon-Avon are back-projected, somewhat randomly, behind the table and chair. Sudden switchings of lighting states – usually cued by Anne’s clicking fingers – signal changes in time and place. Some sound-effects, like the baby crying behind us as she tries to soothe it in front of us, are also a bit disconcerting but may be forgiven for a one-night-stand in a venue not normally purposed for performance.

Sampson’s singing seems tentative and lacking in confidence. Maybe the idea is to convey introspection but the loud canned music makes the inaudibility of lyrics frustrating. Maybe they could be treated as soliloquies, played direct to the audience – and acapella, even. 

What endures is the evocation of how Anne copes materially and emotionally over the decades Will is off pursuing his vocation in London. Always owning her own choices and never playing the victim, although she does wish the children could know their father as more than a portrait, she is the epitome of resilience and tolerance – not least because she balances acceptance of his semi-secret lover (the young man addressed in sonnets 1-126) with the odd passing romp with some fellow herself.

Her bête-noir is Bill’s sister, Joan, who is constantly urging Anne to read the will. Assuming she knows its contents, we see her as being the “bitch” Anne says she is – and this mutual animosity falls with the playwright’s ‘dramatic licence’.

So too does his treatment of the death of Hamnet, aged 11. Thiessen does contextualise it accurately within time the Black Plague swept London and its surrounding towns, seeding the possibility of infection via a rat Hamnet catches and starts to dissect. But it is a trip to the beach, through towns where the dead are being burned, where an idyllic time spent contemplating the vast horizon and creating a portrait of Will in the sand is subverted by the boy’s drowning.  

Knowing Shakespeare remained in London for ten more years, writing 15 to 19 more plays (depending on which you ascribe to him; many of which are purported contain references to his family tragedy), it does seem odd that this play implies Will retired from the theatre soon after Hamnet’s death. If this is to reinforce the implication that Anne is short-changed by Bill’s will because he blames her, it’s a dodgy bit of dramaturgy.

Nevertheless Shakespeare’s Will tells an absorbing and timely tale that is well worth contemplating. It deserves many more performances in this commemorative year.

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For the gentle recounting by one Anne Hathaway of Stratford, of her life as Shakespeare’s dutiful wife, a simple set creates a suitable atmosphere: Small wooden table with crimson velvet cloth, chair, lantern, and an unassuming paper scroll, being the title prop. Three long rolls of paper hung down the back wall give contrast as well as providing the surface for a handful of scene-setting visual projections. 

This review kindly supported by The James Wallace Arts Trust http://www.wallaceartstrust.org.nz/

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