The Mirror and the Light, review: whittled-down Mantel makes a powerful case for traditional theatre
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.
The new stage incarnation reactivates some of that excitement. The fact that it has landed in the heart of town with no prior try-out attests to its producers’ confidence. 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 run has already been extended by two months owing to popular demand.
This conventional, period-dressed affair will look like a stuffy throwback to a bygone era of theatrical endeavour to some. 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.
Fans of the book must brace themselves for much ruthless filleting. 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. And time flies at breakneck speed, almost 900 pages in paperback are whittled to two and half hours.
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. 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. 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.
As it’s a standalone piece, inevitably the audience has to work to play catch-up. But it’s not particularly difficult. The speech sounds contemporary, with the odd ornate flourish; and the script combines fleet exposition with nimble wit. Above all, the story – albeit shorn of the novel’s captivating interior narration – grips.
Beginning with Cromwell’s imprisonment and interrogation by his enemies – with Nicholas Woodeson a memorably vicious Norfolk - then rewinding to how he got there, Mantel and co take you beyond Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. The king is older, testier, hobbled by a bad leg, a disaster in the bedroom; Nathaniel Parker, who won an Olivier last time, provides a grimacing heartiness, dominating the stage, hands on hips, like the painting by Holbein, who features.
It’s up to Henry’s chief minister, “Crum”, all wary calculation, tight-lipped circumspection and mounting care in Miles’s performance, to fix what proves unfixable, his fortunes and those of the nation hanging on the whims of the king and the vagaries of desire.
He reconciles the sometimes horrible Henry to his headstrong daughter Mary (“You are changed, my lord father, stouter,” snipes Melissa Allan’s princess). But urging Anna of Cleves (a coolly self-possessed Rosanna Adams) as a substitute for Jane Seymour (a pale and interesting Olivia Marcus), he sets the coordinates of his career for doomsday.
I could have done with more scenic warmth; Herrin pictorially arranges up to two dozen actors amid a forbidding grey-stone set, with ugly scaffolding aloft. More music, too, and greater, or at least slower, vocal projection as well. Inasmuch as it points you back to the book, it’s a useful addendum, but it powerfully makes the case for a theatre outing too. The battered West End needs it. I was glad to have seen it. The audience lustily applauded.
Until Jan 23. Tickets: 0844 482 5151
To book tickets, please visit Telegraph Tickets
