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.