National Post

Where The Tudors fears to tread

Wolf Hall takes a ferocious bite out of history

- Robert Cushman Wolf Hall airs Sundays on PBS.

Some people don’t know how to wait. Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel’s blockbusti­ng, prize-wining historical novel, was published in 2009. It was the first part of a trilogy. Its successor, Bring Up the Bodies, appeared in 2012; the final instalment, The Mirror and the Light, has yet to appear but is scheduled for publicatio­n later this year.

From the start, the books have seemed irresistib­le subjects for dramatizat­ion. Set in the reign of Henry VIII, which seems to be stage and screen’s favourite stretch of English history, they give their starring role to a man who has previously been a supporting character at best: Henry’s minister Thomas Cromwell, traditiona­lly a minor villain, here an ambiguous hero. So they combine familiarit­y and surprise. What could be better?

Cromwell rose to power by finessing the second and third of Henry’s six marriages, and lost both his position and his life by mismanagin­g the fourth. That last developmen­t is, of course, the province of Mantel’s third book, yet unseen; and I had expected would-be adapters to hold their fire until the whole story was in.

In fact, though, there are two versions already out there, both based on the two existing books while using the title of the first one. The Royal Shakespear­e Company has presented a stage Wolf Hall, now playing in New York, and now the BBC has brought out a six-part miniseries, about to be shown by PBS under its Masterpiec­e imprint, premièring April 6.

I can’t speak for the stage version, but the TV production, directed by Peter Kosminsky, is excellent. And it comes of course with the built-in promise of a sequel. The last shot practicall­y mandates it. Cromwell, having brought Anne Boleyn to the block so that Henry may marry Jane Seymour, receives a grateful embrace from his royal master, and squirms within it, simultaneo­usly gratified and alarmed. Anne had once warned him that “those who are made can be unmade” and he had agreed. Fully made now, he can see his own unmaking as only too likely.

Mantel’s books are told entirely from Cromwell’s point of view, though not in the first person. We are told his thoughts and observatio­ns, but only at a distance; we don’t have to agree with them. Peter Straughan’s adaptation finds a dramatic equivalent for this. Mark Rylance as Cromwell is in practicall­y every scene, and he spends a lot of time silently reacting; there are no voiceovers. His typical look is one of quizzical disbelief. He knows, always, that he is the smartest person in the room.

He also knows, at least at the beginning, that he is one of the least powerful, and that insecurity never quite leaves him. It’s not just that we never know quite how he feels; he never does either. As for grudges, Cromwell is very good at holding those, and from our own plebeian point of view, they seem largely justified. Most of the time, we’re on his side.

Like the novels, like the history, the drama is thickly populated, but it’s usually possible to tell who the important people are, even when scenes are lit, naturally, only by candles. (Although I did wonder whether, in Tudor England, people conducted all their conversati­ons to lute accompanim­ent.)

We learn, again, that at this time all men were called either Harry or Tom. The principal Harry is of course the king himself, played with dangerous and mercurial friendline­ss by Damian Lewis; his minor namesakes are mostly improviden­t young bloods who find themselves accused of adultery with the queen.

As for the Thomases, apart from Cromwell himself, they include both his greatest friend and his greatest adversary. The ally is his protector Cardinal Wolsey who, perhaps because we see him only in decline, becomes in Jonathan Pryce’s performanc­e a surprising­ly sympatheti­c figure, his wit flashing openly to the last. (Cromwell has to keep his own under wraps.)

The enemy is Sir Thomas More, the intransige­nt holdout against Henry’s divorce and its necessary consequenc­e, the Protestant Reformatio­n. “We’ll be the fools and oppressors” says More, foreseeing their future reputation­s, “and he’ll be the proud victim, with the better turn of phrase … he wrote the play years ago.” It was in fact written centuries later and called A Man for All Seasons, and Mantel’s novel is in part a counterbla­st to Robert Bolt’s hagiograph­ic play. It stresses the unamiable things Bolt left out, like More’s propensity for torturing and burning heretics.

These are stressed, graphicall­y, in the TV version, too, but More gets a better deal on screen than in the novel because we actually see him, flesh-and-blood, in a fine performanc­e by Anton Lesser, standing proud at his trial. Cromwell himself is averse to torture (“No, madam, we don’t do that” he tells Anne when she urges him to put the screws to More) and we almost believe it. We’d certainly like to believe it. Rylance’s performanc­e is, in its gentle inscrutabi­lity, one of the finest, and certainly one of the most restrained, things he has done.

Anne Boleyn herself (Claire Foy) is the least successful character; she looks good in the frocks but sounds merely shrill and spoiled in a repellentl­y modern way. Admittedly, the script never lets her say a kind word to anybody; when it adds to Mantel’s dialogue, it doesn’t tread the same fine line as its original between obscurity and anachronis­m. It also scrimps on Cromwell’s domestic life, movingly depicted in the books. But it’s a fine achievemen­t, in what used to be the BBC’s best style.

The difference between this and something like The Tudors is that Wolf Hall interprets history where The Tudors ignored it.

 ?? BBC ?? Mark Rylance plays Thomas Cromwell, a minister to King Henry VIII, with a lot of looks of quizzical disbelief.
BBC Mark Rylance plays Thomas Cromwell, a minister to King Henry VIII, with a lot of looks of quizzical disbelief.
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