The speech sounds contemporary, with the odd ornate flourish and the script combines fleet exposition with nimble wit. In fact, were you able to watch all three parts back to back (there are no plans yet), you'd barely see the joins, not least because the same director, Jeremy Herrin, is in charge.Īs it’s a standalone piece, inevitably the audience has to work to play catch-up. Though the pair could usefully enlarge and heighten key moments of dramatic conflict, their triumph is the seamless realisation of the mess of high-level human affairs. Mantel has collaborated here not with veteran adapter Mike Poulton but Ben Miles, who commandingly took the lead as Cromwell before and does so again. And time flies at breakneck speed, almost 900 pages in paperback are whittled to two and half hours. Beheadings frame the action - Anne Boleyn’s in May 1536, which we don’t see, and Cromwell’s in June 1540, which we do, symbolically imagined at the hands of his vile, abusive (dead) father Walter. Yet it seems hand-stitched to delight those who love historical drama served up without a heavily mediating modernity or, that increasing bane, woke-inflected judgmentalism.įans of the book must brace themselves for much ruthless filleting. This conventional, period-dressed affair will look like a stuffy throwback to a bygone era of theatrical endeavour to some. The run has already been extended by two months owing to popular demand.

The imprimatur of the RSC too is like a royal summons, especially for those who saw the first parts of the magnum opus – Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies – in Stratford or the West End in 2014. The fact that it has landed in the heart of town with no prior try-out attests to its producers’ confidence. The new stage incarnation reactivates some of that excitement. Recreating the rich tapestry of Thomas Cromwell’s fateful final years, The Mirror and the Light, the concluding novel in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, was greeted by a stampede of sales and breathless admiration when it was published last March.

Book review the mirror and the light