Cromwell at the Swan by Mary Hoffman

Achieving the impossible - a review of the RSC productions of Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies

Ben Miles as Thomas Cromwell and Lydia Leonard as Anne Boleyn

When I first heard that Ben Miles was to play Thomas Cromwell in the RSC adaptations of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, my instinctive reaction was "but he's much too good-looking."

I was wrong, of course. Miles has reached that point in his acting career where a piece of imaginative casting like this gives him the chance to throw off the shackles of early romantic lead swoonworthiness and show us what he's really made of. And on the days when both plays are done he has most of six hours to do it in.

From the opening lines of Mike Poulton's brilliant adaptation of Hilary Mantel's two Man Booker prize-winning novels, you know you are a safe pair of hands. After a wordless prologue of Tudor dance when we first glimpse  Henry Vlll, Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, the scene switches to Cardinal Wolsey's house, where a very wet Cromwell enters.

"Cromwell. Late," says Stephen Gardiner, Wolsey's Secretary.

"Yes - Isn't it?" answers Cromwell, pleasantly putting his rival firmly in his place.

You sense from the beginning that this is not a man to tangle with. And then you are with Cromwell and his master, the Cardinal, and their dialogue sweeps you into the life of this busy, loyal, calculating and intelligent man. You don't need the actual beginning of the book where the young boy Thomas is brutally beaten by his father; there are enough allusions to convey that.

Although Ben Miles really is outstanding as Cromwell, the whole ensemble is strong, with not a false note. Cardinal Wolsey is Paul Jesson, a towering presence even after death, the father figure that earns Cromwell's undying devotion and informs so many of his later actions and loyalties.

Henry Vlll is Nathaniel Parker, again not an obvious choice for the role, but this in an interpretation, not an impression and his growing menace, self-deception and unpredictability are well conveyed.

Just how do you set about adapting a 653 page novel into a three hour play, with interval? Mike Poulton describes it as "taking apart a Rolls Royce engine and reassembling the parts into a light aircraft." You don't get Mantel's voice, that tone that she described to us here on the History Girls as "something between first and third person," but you do get some of the flavour of her personal touches, through the inclusion of details like  Ambassador Chapuys' fantastical Christmas hat, rendered suddenly inappropriate at court through the news of old Queen Katherine's death.

You don't see Cromwell's daughters, snatched away by illness, but they are there  in reference and in the cracking of Miles's voice when he reads the name of Anne Cromwell, written in his late wife's prayer book. We do see Lizzie Cromwell, played by Olivia Darnley, who is also - amazingly - Mary Boleyn, and we get a strong sense of Cromwell's family life, as we do in the books.

Photo by Francesco Guidicini

Hilary Mantel has been criticised for being too kind to Cromwell, for making him too believably human, but surely this is right? We know he was married with three children, two of whom died young and that he was unfailingly loyal to his old master. However ruthless he might have been in his political choices and sense of expediency and self-preservation, that doesn't mean he couldn't have been a loving family man and faithful friend. What she does is present a controversial historical figure in the round and Mike Poulton's scripts do that too.

Only at one point, in Bring up the Bodies, in the scene where Cromwell makes his pact with the Dukes of Suffolk and Norfolk to bring about Anne's downfall, did I feel a lack of sympathy with the main character. And I didn't feel that in the book so maybe there was there a slight loss of nuance.

It apparently took Mike Poulton nine drafts to come up with this masterly transfer from page to stage. You don't sense the effort behind it. He says that members of the audience will miss some favourite scenes and that for me included the peacock-feather Angel wings and the huge Christmas star that so terrified Mark Smeaton when he was shut up with them in Cromwell's house. But the drama worked fine without them and that is the main thing.

The roles of Cromwell's clerk Rafe Sadler and his friend's son, the poet Thomas Wyatt are enlarged to give more opportunity  for confidences and a sense of whom Cromwell trusts. And who could have guessed that mousy little Jane Seymour, played by Leah Brotherhead, could be so interesting and savvy? Well, anyone who had read the books, I suppose.

Ben Miles with Paul Jesson as Cardinal Wolsey

I did wonder about that, about how many of the people in the sold-out Swan Theatre in Stratford would have actually read both titles. I think you probably get much more from the plays if you have, though it could be that people have just been drawn there by the books' and the writer's enormous reputation. And they would have enjoyed the experience too.

What you see is the story arc of the rises and falls of reputations and the fatal consequences when Fortune's wheel spins the characters down to the bottom-most part of their circulation. First Cromwell, then Anne Boleyn and of course, when the third book, The Mirror and the Light, comes out (we hope) next year, the whole pattern will be repeated with Cromwell himself. And that must surely be staged as well, completing his remarkable trajectory from blacksmith's boy to Earl of Essex and the most powerful man in England after the king.

After the king. That is the point. We see how Henry can turn on a sixpence (?a groat) when angered by Ambassador Chapuys. He rounds on Cromwell and the blacksmith's boy nearly wallops his monarch. As Henry's reign progresses, we know he will deteriorate into even more fits of temper and irrationality: Cromwell's fate is already written in the stars if not yet on the page.

This is a fine and subtle adaptation. I particularly admired the way in which we saw only the rehearsal for Anne's execution, not the bloody act itself. Almost every choice is the un-obvious, the rejection of sensationalism and horror in this most violent of love stories.

And the recurrence of the dead Cardinal was just right, reminding us of one of Cromwell's most powerful attachments, the older man who had, unlike the blacksmith, valued him and treated him well.

The plays are transferring to the Aldwych Theatre from 1st May to 6 September and it will be another sell-out. I shall go again, even though only the most expensive seats are left. It will be interesting to see the change from a thrust stage to proscenium. Or maybe the theatre will be adapted? 

Whatever happens, I can't wait.

Elizabeth I, Richard II and Dr Who

 ‘I am Richard II, know ye not that,’ is what Elizabeth I is recorded as saying in 1601, with reference to Shakespeare’s play of that name, demonstrating the extent to which such a drama, written in the late years of her reign was as much about the present as the past. The most recent production of Richard II from the RSC is running at the Barbican with David Tennant in the title role. Most well known, judging by the queues of fans at the stage door, for his stint as Dr Who, Tennant takes us on another sort of time travel with a rendition of the beleaguered king that manages to combine both Elizabeth and Richard, visiting at once two distinct periods in history, each turbulent in its own way. In the late sixteenth century the deposition of Richard II, within such a dramatic context, articulated the suggestion that there were circumstances under which justification could be found to go against the divine right of Kings and be rid of a flawed ruler. This would have resonated with an Elizabethan audience aware that Richard’s demise allowed for the rise of two legendary monarchs (Henry IV and V) known for their great martial victories over France. Indeed, the deposition scene was sufficiently controversial in its time, drawing dangerous parallels between Richard and Elizabeth, as to have been left out of most performances and printed versions of the play.

We tend to think of the long reign of Gloriana as a great triumph from start to finish, with the Spanish threat defeated and the violent religious polarisation of her sibling’s reigns solved. But as the Queen aged she relied increasingly on unpopular advisors and her vacillating temperament, which had worked in her favour for so long (playing off the rulers of Europe one against the other with indecision over which she would marry) crystallised into a stubbornness that was ruled by fear. Elizabeth’s refusal to name a successor, for fear of people’s tendency to look, as she described it, ‘to the rising than to the setting sun,’ and having passed the age when she might realistically be able to bear an heir of her body, had by the 1590s created a problematic instability in an England that was increasingly perturbed.  For years after the great defeat of the Armada the country was in a state of jitters, fearing Spanish reprisals and, despite Elizabeth’s policy of religious toleration, the threat of Catholic rebellion within England’s shores had become a permanent concern, added to that four consecutive years of failed harvests meant people were starving. It is no wonder then that plays such as Richard II, with a weak and vacillating king at its heart, emerged at this moment in time, to hold up a mirror to the Elizabethan court. It was an oblique way to criticise the status quo without ending up on the scaffold. Shakespeare’s Richard, a man clearly demonstrated as being overly dependent on the advice of suspect favourites, is deposed by the decisive and assertive Bolingbroke who stands to represent just the safe pair of hands late Elizabethan England might have wished for.

Tennant brings to the role of Richard less of the fay girlishness of some interpretations and more of a regal stiffness and distance, a rigidity of mind and body that articulates an entrenchment of stubbornness and an inability to change. He has long hair, white wafting robes, a ghoulishly pale face and, as he is lowered into view to sit motionless in his throne above the action, he is both a sexless image of the saviour and also the doll-like Elizabeth of her famous coronation portrait. At a distance it is easy to forget, given the many successes and the length of Elizabeth’s reign, the extent to which it was difficult for England to accept a woman at the helm. These difficulties are articulated in the figure of Richard who displays many of the negative tropes considered to be the essence of femininity in the period: weakness, mutability and so on. Elizabeth had successfully rebranded herself, from the illegitimate daughter of Henry VIII and the loathed Anne Boleyn, into the Virgin Queen, mother to the nation, an untouchable icon of perfect ethereal womanhood, as if she were an Athena born from her father’s helmet. However as her body began to decay, forcing people to think of the uncertainty beyond her reign, her status as icon became increasingly difficult to pull off, requiring increasing artifice as each year passed.

In the play’s final scene when the enthroned Bolingbroke is lowered down onto the elevated set, as was his predecessor at the play’s beginning, we see an entirely different figure. As Henry IV he has discarded his chainmail for something altogether more regal, but beneath the purple silk sits a warrior ready to take on his enemies, an ideal the beleaguered English could only hope for. In 1661, on the eve of the Essex rebellion – in which the disaffected Earl of Essex, the popular warrior with the common touch, hoped to raise the people up to depose Elizabeth in favour of her Scottish cousin James – Essex’s steward bribed the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to put on a performance Richard II including the deposition scene. The intention was that it would encourage people, girded by the sight of a weak king deposed in favour of a strong one and the dangerously subversive notion that there are times when divine right is wrong, to join the cause. The plot failed, Essex lost his head and two years later James Stuart came to the throne anyway.

What then is the political relevance of such a play for the twenty-first century audience? Is it possible to see echoes of post-Iraq Tony Blair pushed off his perch by Gordon Brown – not really, because we no longer live under the tyranny of absolute rule or divine right. Richard II does not have the contemporary parallels of a play like Hamlet, with its focus on surveillance and political paranoia. Its lessons are more personal and intimately psychological, allowing us to see the problems of intractability and the reliance on dubious advice writ large. What it also tells us is that history always remains relevant – I feel sure the Time Lord would approve.

The RSC production of Richard II runs at the Barbican until 25^th January and is being screened at cinemas nationwide.

For novel news go to: ElizabethFremantle.com

Climbing the Family Tree by Mary Hoffman

This one's a beaut, isn't it? It shows the ancestors of Sigmund Christoph, Graf von Zeil und Trauchburg.  I've been thinking a lot about family trees since an email conversation with our November guest Sarah Gristwood. I had mildly criticised the one in her excellent book, Blood Sisters,  for the Houses of York and Lancaster. Sarah was in complete agreement, having been compelled to make simplifications by the book's designer.

The scales fell from my eyes at that point. Ever since seeing the RSC's magnificent Histories Cycle - twice - a few years ago, I have been fascinated by Plantagenet history and no book I have read on the subject since has had an adequate family tree. I have been compiling my own composite genealogical chart on a large roll of paper and I can see why designers might ask for simplification!

Miniature, Jacques de Besançon, Paris, c.1485. Showing 43 generations.

Family trees have been popular ever since this representation of the Jesse Tree, representing the descent of Christ. That's a pretty ambitious project; not even my Plantagenet one aims at 43 generations!

But if you think about it, no family tree can include everything, or it would end up containing everyone in the world. So where do you stop? Confucius's genealogy, initially represented as a fan, was said to have two million people on it. The update has 1.2 million living descendants! Not even the longest roll of lining-paper would cope with that.

Genealogy is a fast-growing hobby in the UK for people who want to research their family history; in our family, it's my older sister who has the bug. She sends me bulletins from the genealogical research front, with titbits about obscure relatives from generations back, complicated by the fact that in our parents' families there was a marked tendency to call people by names other than their given ones.

The resources for such seekers after  facts - the chroniclers and archivists to be found in many families - are so much easier to gain access to in the Internet age. My sister uses the UK censuses up to 1911 and they have yielded much information. There are many books published to help and the success of UK television shows such as Who do you Think you are? has swelled the numbers of people joined Societies which share resources. There is even genealogy software to help generate family trees. And websites like Family Search and the BBC's Family History

When our youngest daughter brought home the man who was to become her life partner, she lent us the DVD of a TV show that used him as a subject to discover links to distinguished ancestors, such as the Duke of Wellington, the man who helped win the Battle of Bosworth field for Henry Tudor and - the clincher - King Arthur!So that's a new use of family trees - a sort of Debrett's to impress potential in-laws.

When I write my own novels, I always make family trees. Sometimes they end up published in the final books, as in the di Chimici genealogy above, for the Stravaganza sequence.  This one takes you up only to 1578 though the most recent book, City of Swords (2012) has added - and subtracted - some names. That's what writers of fiction do after all: bring people into existence and sometimes kill them.

But even when they aren't published, I need my family trees. How can you write about any characters without knowing how they fit in that web of relationships? How can you get the ages right? And how can you climb about confidently in the branches of your story without a strong tree to support you?