Hilary Mantel
How clothes tell a story
Everything begins with the body. It puts the breath behind the words, it wears the clothes that make the manners that make the man. Back in 2005, when I sat down to write my Tudor novel,
Wolf Hall, the story showed itself to me before it spoke, in a textured swirl of black and gold, a liquid gleam that would soon swathe and drape the courtiers of Henry VIII.
By 2013, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s costume workshop was recreating, stitch and seam perfect, my inner vision: a robust and glittering monarch, a stately Catherine of Aragon, a feline Anne Boleyn, a cardinal shocking in scarlet and, at the centre, the sober figure of powerbroker Thomas Cromwell.
Two linked plays – Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring up the Bodies – began in Stratford in 2014, transferred to the Aldwych Theatre in the West End, and finally to the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway. Mike Poulton, the adapter, picked a way through the novels to make a stage narrative, and Christopher Oram created a visual world that was stark, stripped for action, marked out by fire: a swish of crimson made a royal tent, the allpowerful Cardinal Wolsey tumbled to oblivion before a single hellish backcloth, and flames sprang up at the characters’ feet. The glowing costumes lured the eye, sparking the connection between our sad beige century and a hand-stitched era where courtiers were like living jewels.
These were clothes built on the body of the person who was to wear them. The actors were sewn into their roles, just yards from where we were rehearsing. The RSC has the biggest in-house costume-making department of any British theatre – 30 people in an enclave humming with purpose, where they don’t just cut and sew, but dye and print, make armour and hats.
Each year, the RSC extends its global reach, so millions of people see the result. Yet, at present, theatre fans by the thousand are walking along the riverbank, hardly knowing the workshops are there. Could that change? Today, the RSC launches a fundraising campaign called Stitch in Time. With no substantial renovation since the Seventies, the workshops are dilapidated and access too poor to let in the public.
A restoration – a careful one, as the site is listed and historically important – would cost an estimated £8.7million. But it would open up the world-class costume collection, enhancing the experience of visitors to the town, and fulfilling the RSC’S mandate to show what it does and how. It would also allow the company to set up new apprenticeships and training schemes, carrying the expertise and flair of the workshop into the future.
Costume always counts, even in the most minimalist modern drama. In the Wolf Hall plays, the clothes told stories about power politics and sexual politics. They marked out changes in status and fortune, as if the characters were carrying their fates on their backs. Lucy Briers, who played both Catherine of Aragon and Lady Rochford, explained it like this: “You wonder why, in the portraits of the era, the women adopt the same pose, their elbows out, their hands clasped. You put the costume on and you realise – those trailing sleeves are so heavy, you have no choice.”
Kitting out Henry’s court was a task to which the workshop rose magnificently. “We don’t often get the chance to do this,” one craftswoman told me with relish. The challenge was to produce costumes that combined authenticity with practicality, because, under Jeremy Herrin’s fluent direction, our actors needed to switch roles fast. The tiny, valiant Leah Brotherhead had little more time than she needed to duck behind a bush, as she shed the penitential black of the young Princess Mary for the springlike persona of Jane Seymour, then whisked into the guise of Lady Worcester, minxy and pregnant. From the earliest rehearsals, our women wore hoops so they knew how to move when their heavy gowns were finished. A high-caste Tudor with jutting shoulders or swaying skirts needed plenty of space – in life, or in the wings.
Nathaniel Parker’s charismatic, complex (and Olivier Award-winning) king was not the fat cartoon figure of later years, but a man in his prime, with a slightly expanding waistline and massively expanding powers. Handsome, gleaming with gold chains, bulky with soft enveloping furs, Henry was kingly at all hours, wearing his embroidered nightgown and cap with a regal air. Yet the story’s pivotal figure, Cromwell, was the greatest challenge. How to transform the whipthin actor Ben Miles into the burly councillor familiar from Holbein’s portrait?
He began as plain Master Cromwell, tailored in charcoal, merging into the background. Then costume mimicked the process of history. The London lawyer became the royal adviser. As his story unfolded, he compelled every eye. The change came with texture and line, rather than colour: Cromwell never became a peacock courtier, but he looked more assured with every scene. There was no time for costume changes. Through two plays, Miles almost never left the stage. And when your actor is working on that sort of schedule, you can hardly ask him to gain weight. So Cromwell was built in layers – gaining a little in bulk, but far more in presence. A man’s authority consists of how he moves, the space he dominates, the swing of the weighted hem of his cloak: clear my path, the costume says.
I learned a lot working with the RSC. It seemed to me a hard-working organisation with a heart, where everyone was purposive, committed and flexible. As the plays evolved, it was useful that the clothes came into being moments from the action. When, for instance, it became clear that we needed three black veils for three queens, the costume department could magic them up and the queens were veiled that very afternoon.
The style of the plays was intrinsic to their success. No one was more proud than I when Oram collected an Olivier Award for costume design in April 2015 or when, two months later, he bounded on to the stage at Radio City in New York to pick up a Tony award. He would be the first to
‘When I slipped my own hand into an RSC sleeve, it was no longer my hand: it was narrow, white, alien’
credit the workers in Stratford, for standing behind his vision.
Nothing in the theatre is more fun, more glamorous, more transformative, than costume. So I wish success to the Stitch in Time campaign – I would like the public to access the costume makers’ art and craft. I think of my time in Stratford as “when we clothed the wolves”. As I work towards the close of the trilogy my mind goes back to the moment when I slipped my own hand into an RSC sleeve. It gave me a shock. It was no longer my hand: it was narrow, white, alien. Understanding begins with the body: I grasped more in that moment than in months of poring over inventories and pattern books.
Recently, Michelle Terry took up her role as artistic director at Shakespeare’s Globe vowing “to take care of each and every moment, each and every stitch”. Those words would resonate in the Stratford costume workshops, and for me they express my sense of how a book is written or a play made: each detail, each scene tailored to fit.
So now as I write, I think of the busy brains and fingers in the Stratford workshop, of beading and fringing, linings, tags and buttonholes: clothing Tudor bodies, shaping Tudor souls.
For more information and to support the Stitch in Time campaign, visit: rsc.org.uk/stitchintime
The RSC’S Summer 2018 season is announced today. Visit: rsc.org.uk