Kate Maltby Kate Maltby

Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies: ‘a major theatrical event – don’t settle for one, see both’

In Hilary Mantel’s Tudor England, it never stops raining. As she writes in her evocative programme note for the RSC stage adaptation of  Wolf Hall, she first envisaged the life of Henry VIII’s political fixer, Thomas Cromwell, as ‘a room: the smell of wood smoke, ink, wet dogs and wet wool, and the steady patter of rain’. I’d heard, correctly, that Jeremy Herrin’s production was every bit as close and claustrophobic as Mantel’s novel. So as I set off, it seemed a disadvantageous prospect to spend a day of blazing summer sunshine cooped up with six hours of theatre, reviewing the double bill of Wolf Hall, and its sequel, Bring Up The Bodies.

In fact, thanks to Herrin’s startling, vivid production, time flies, especially in the second play, a Faustian thriller in which Anne Boleyn’s fate tightens inexorably around her neck. Mantel’s double-Booker winning novels reimagined Henry VIII’s break with Rome through the life story of the lawyer who made it possible: Thomas Cromwell, blacksmith’s son and meticulous strategist, the first great success of an emerging Tudor meritocracy – or, if you prefer, a brutish Steerpike minus the polish, clambering to power on the headless bodies of inbred aristos.

Cromwell, played here by a charismatic Ben Miles, disposes of two inconvenient wives for Henry VIII, Katherine of Aragon by long-protracted annulment, then Anne Boleyn, on the executioner’s block. But for Mantel, he’s a working class hero. A voracious reader when not spiking heads, he’s probably Michael Gove’s hero too.

Mike Poulton’s supple adaptation underscores Mantel’s focus on class struggle: the religious war between tradition and reformation becomes one between old families and the new men, with their English Bibles and pesky modern notions like universal literacy. But Poulton and director Herrin also capture Mantel’s sense of historical truth as something always just eluding us, memory as always failing at the crucial moment.

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Kate Maltby
Written by
Kate Maltby
Kate Maltby writes about the intersection of culture, politics and history. She is a theatre critic for The Times and is conducting academic research on the intellectual life of Elizabeth I.

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