Wolf Hall: a challenging book should also be challenging TV

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/jan/26/wolf-hall-tv-adaptation-hilary-mantel-novels

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A notable aspect of the opening episode of Wolf Hall (Wednesdays, 9pm, BBC2) was the crisp clarity of the actors’ delivery. This is partly because the dialogue was being spoken by some of the nation’s greatest stage actors – Mark Rylance, Jonathan Pryce, Anton Lesser – but may also have been a response, conscious or sub-conscious, to last year’s row over alleged incomprehensibility in the BBC’s Jamaica Inn. (A controversy repeated, after Wolf Hall had finished filming, by the start of series two of Broadchurch.)

But having avoiding a “mumblegate row”, Wolf Hall has stumbled into “candlegate” – complaints that the realistic period lighting made scenes hard to see – and “tanglegate”. The latter an objection from some viewers that they had difficulty following a plot which, in Peter Straughan’s adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s two Man Booker prize-winning novels about Thomas Cromwell, begins with the sacking of Cardinal Wolsey and then employs overlapping flashback strands to explain why.

Light is shed easily on the first issue. As Peter Kosminsky, the director of Wolf Hall, pointed out with commendable politeness in an interview on Radio 5 Live on Thursday, the increasing reliance of journalists on social media as a source of stories means that a few dozen people who tweeted that they couldn’t see what was going on had their views reflected on newspaper front pages. At least three million other viewers were presumably at ease with the light levels.

The allegation of narrative incomprehensibility is more complicated. Some bemused viewers have understandably worried that they are disadvantaged in understanding Wolf Hall by not having read the books. But in fact, reaction from those who struggled to “get on” with Mantel’s novels was along similar lines: that they found them hard to follow. Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies sometimes ask the reader to work hard and so it is proper that the TV versions should occasionally be a demanding watch. The possibility that a novel’s degree of difficulty need not be ditched for screen is one of the reasons that we have the BBC as well as Hollywood. And, in one way, the viewer has it easier than the reader. On the page, Mantel is stuck with the fact that almost every man in the story is called Thomas, while, on screen, at least they look helpfully different.

It is true that Kosminsky and Straughan have not helped the audience as much as they could have done. But I mean that completely as a compliment. A big and symbolic decision is to avoid voice-over, the default tactic of attempts to visualise literature. These disembodied monologues are often justified as a way of retaining “the voice of the book” but their real attraction is as a lazy solution to problems in the narrative, dialogue or editing.

When California test audiences react in a confused or lukewarm manner to a movie at preview screenings, the first solution of panicked producers is to add an explanatory voice track, in which the narrator sometimes literally introduces the characters: “This is me, One-Legged Ted. How’d I get the nick-name? Keep watching. That’s my brother, Wolfie, who once slept with my sister, who’s over there by the drinks cabinet: careful, sis, you just got out of rehab …” etc. Another increasingly popular method is to caption fictional characters at first entry as if they are contributors in a documentary: “General Thaddeus “Tad” Jawbone, supreme commander, US naval forces” and so on.

Narration or captioning would have made the first episode of Wolf Hall simpler to follow but they would also have left it much less complex and atmospheric. The opening white-on-black captions setting up, like a Star Wars prologue, the monarchical and Vatican politics, was both unusually long and held on the screen for what seemed an extended period. But, once it had dissolved, viewers were trusted to keep up.

Teasing, misleading or outright mystifying the audience – in the early stages of an episode or even series – is an essential strategy of making TV dramas and one of the principle pleasures of watching them. For me, the first episode of Wolf Hall seemed to contain nods, deliberate or not, to two of its great predecessors in the genre.

In its stealthy, oblique setting up of the people and intrigues, Straughan’s first script, Three Card Trick, resembled the great 1979 TV version of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the more recent big-screen adaptation of which was written by Straughan and his late wife Bridget O’Connor. The point about that six-part TV series was that, for several episodes, it was often incomprehensible even if you had read the novel. If subjected to the instant “WTF is going on?” test of some commentators, the Le Carré serial would, these days, be toast rather than toasted at awards ceremonies.

And, in holding back the entry of Damien Lewis’s King Henry until the very end of the first episode, Straughan and Kosminsky echoed a previous imperial late entry: the carefully-withheld first sight of Martin Sheen’s President Bartlett until the final stages of the West Wing’s pilot episode; another show that asked the audience to do a certain amount of working out of who was who.

The risk of controversies such as mumblegate, candlegate and tanglegate is a tyranny of clarity, in which there is a tacit – or, at more nervous broadcasters, explicitly guidelined – understanding that even viewers who are inattentive, impatient or suffer some frailty of the senses must be able to hear, see and comprehend every detail immediately.

But it is a crucial tool in drama that the production must at times be allowed to keep the viewers literally or metaphorically in the dark. Avoiding the babying devices of voiceover or expositional speeches (along the lines of “You understand, Cardinal Wolsey, that King Henry VIII is upset because the pope in Rome ...?”), Wolf Hall pays viewers the compliment of treating them as grownups and we may need to show some maturity in response.