Wolf Hall recap: episode one – a clash of artistries to relish
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Version 0 of 1. Peter Kosminsky hasn’t adapted Wolf Hall, he’s televised it. Those coming to the TV version from Hilary Mantel’s novel will relish the clash of artistries. Mantel has the novelist’s advantage of limitless space. When complete, with its third instalment (God grant her health), she will have produced a million-word sequence of Trollopian dimensions. Kosminsky, with a mere six hours and 60,000 words of dialogue at his disposal, has pace, flashback and visual impact. Images will always work better on screen. Unlike the novel, the TV Wolf Hall opens with distantly viewed galloping horses – going where? Coming from where? Mantel, of course, also keeps her cards close to her chest. That damned title, what does it mean? Is it the wolfishness of mankind? Homo homini lupus, says the Latin proverb (man is a wolf to men). Or is Wolf Hall, like Brideshead, the architecture that expresses the inherent meaning of the civilisation that constructed it. The Tudor age was an age of palaces. Kosminsky cuts to the chase with a foreword inscribed on screen informing the viewer that it is 1529. The king wants to annul his marriage to Catherine, which has been unproductive of an heir, to take a new wife, Anne Boleyn. His arch-fixer, Cardinal Wolsey, has failed him. Mantel would never have kicked off that way. History in tablet form. Her readers have to laboriously assemble the big picture as they go. Kosminsky does not have that luxury. This is not the dumbing down that Mantel declared she would never tolerate, merely the different narrative economy of TV that Kosminsky must serve. We meet Cardinal Wolsey in his palace, awaiting his fall (that resonantly religious term). His enemy, the Duke of Norfolk – whose marriage plans for his niece, Anne Boleyn, Wolsey earlier foiled – has come to strip him of the great seal. He has been “attained in praemunire”. Finished. “They won’t rest till they have my head,” he mutters to a dark-clad lawyer at his side. Wolsey is clad in rich red – an English pope. But only for another 24 hours. His decayed face twitches. He nervously fingers the jewelled crucifix round his neck. For decades, he has used religion for one purpose only: power. It has corrupted him. But he still protests his loyalty to Henry. What is it he will say as he faces the end? “If I had served God as diligently as I have done the king, he would not have given me over in my grey hairs.” The silent counsellor at his side, hair unkempt beneath a shapeless bonnet, is “Master” Cromwell. He has no titles, yet. He’s a nobody, Norfolk tells him. Wolsey’s secretary, less favoured, but higher born (played, slimily, by Mark Gattis), sneers at him. Which of them, in the long game they are playing, will come out ahead? The trial of strength is still to come. Thomas, too, is seen, at occasional private moments, fingering an object tentatively – Tyndale’s English bible, which has been smuggled to him from Germany. It’s the instrument that will bring about the Reformation and reshape England for ever. Cromwell’s fingers are very smart. Somewhere, during his lost years on the continent, he picked up the cardsharper’s skills. There is a flashback to his appointment interview. The butcher’s son, Wolsey, was drawn to him, the blacksmith’s son, as “someone even lower than me”. And, perhaps, even cleverer. “I might have a use for you.” And vice versa. After the fall, to make a personal plea for Wolsey, Cromwell delivers in person to Anne Boleyn the inventory of the Hampton Court property that is now hers. Her enmity, clumsily delivered in a French accent, is relentless. Thomas, who is a brilliant linguist, could answer Anne in Greek, Latin or German. But he’s a man of few words, in any language. In the corridor outside, Cromwell stops to talk to a musician, Mark Smeaton, supposed to be Anne’s secret lover. He will remember Mark, Thomas promises. He is summoned to dinner with Thomas More, smooth, cosmopolitan, serpentine – anything but saintly. One of More’s cat’s paw hangers-on warns Cromwell: “The Cardinal is finished, leave him now.” For us, he implies. He won’t. He loves Wolsey. The love is shown in a tender scene in which he tucks his master up in bed. Elsewhere, Cromwell’s tenderness is reserved for his wife, Elizabeth, and two little daughters. Little Grace, ominously, loves her angel’s wings. While he is away on business, “English sweat” carries off all Thomas’s womenfolk. A tiny tear trickles down his face. There remains only Gregory, Cromwell’s son – someone to use, not love. And he’s a poor Latinist. Thomas revisits his father; their hate is as virulent as ever. He picks up a hammer, and puts it down. Thomas’s revenges are subtle. His childhood beatings still recur as post-traumatic flashbacks. Pain was a school for him. Thomas needs a seat in parliament, where Wolsey is facing 44 indictments. At the very least, he can save his life. At last, in the final three minutes, enters Henry. The episode has, to this point, been shrouded in gloom. With Henry comes sunlight in a blooming garden. He struts, goldenly. Cromwell, still shabby, dares to speak his mind. The king’s “policy”, as in his earlier French adventures and the Boleyn business, is always at peril from his unruly will. Henry listens. As his face indicates, he realises he can use this man. He does not trust or like him. But the wise king trusts nobody. What portion of Wolf Hall’s £7m production budget went to the stars appears well spent. It’s not just their professional skills, but the social depth of their backgrounds that feeds through into their performances. Eton nowadays rivals Rada as an acting school. Damien Lewis is cunningly withheld in this first instalment. He will, one expects, gradually take over the story as the Etonians nowadays take over everything. Mark Rylance, who plays Cromwell, is of humbler social stock and Rada-trained. He knows the moves. He constructs, on the evidence here, a more subtle performance than Lewis. He realises the power of underplaying a role. The point of view is restricted to what Cromwell witnesses. What is going on behind that craggily inscrutable face we can never be sure about. It’s a fair assumption we won’t be, even by the end of the final instalment. Most interesting in this first episode, which he dominates, is Jonathan Pryce, the miner’s son (born John Price), who plays Wolsey, infusing into the butcher’s son a visible social nervousness. Thoughts and observations • The episode ends with a vignette. Cromwell instructs a workman scraping off Wolsey’s coat of arms from the wall to repaint it “more brightly”. • It’s a dense plot. Will it be wise to save the episodes up for a collective six-hour binge? • On that note: should the BBC have waited for the adaptation until Mantel’s third volume? • Does Peter Straughan’s dialogue, with its daring modern inflections, rhythms and idiom work? Or would we like more gadzookery? • Will, in the final analysis, Kosminsky’s artistic achievement be even greater than Mantel’s? |