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’.
