WOLF HALL
Royal Shakespeare Company
A new dramatisation of Hilary Mantel’s novel
By Mike Poulton
I had enjoyed Hilary Mantel’s book, so I was fascinated to see if the play could capture her portrayal of the life of Henry VIII’s adviser Thomas Cromwell.
Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons portrays Cromwell as a calculating political rival to the principled Chancellor Thomas More. Mantel’s approach is very different and makes Cromwell more of a human being, though a conundrum. More is no longer the heroic martyr portrayed by Bolt but quite a sadistic character. If you haven’t read the novel you might well struggle to follow the plot; e.g. blink, and you might miss the death of Cromwell’s wife and children of the ‘sweating sickness’.
Christians might be interested in the play because it covers the period from the 1520s to 1535 when the Reformation was breaking upon England carried along by Henry VIII’s desire to divorce Catherine of Aragon. ‘No Pope has the power to set God’s Word aside,’ says the King grappling with his conscience. But apart from an exchange between Cromwell and More on the place of faith, there is much less about the substance of the Reformation in the play than in the book.
Transfer to London
Using modern English, it is well acted and the Tudor costumes are gorgeous. The second part of the story ‘Bring Up the Bodies’ has also been written as a play and the two transfer from Stratford-upon-Avon to London’s Aldwych Theatre for a short season between May 1 and September 6.
