Christopher Gray feasts on a double bill based on Hilary Mantel’s novels

‘Returns only”. “Limited availability.” It isn’t looking good for prospective audience members eager to see the RSC’s hugely compelling pair of plays adapted from Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning novels dealing with the murderous machinations at the court of King Henry VIII.

But fear not: productions so good must surely have ‘legs’, and there is talk already of a London transfer to supply more general opportunity to marvel at the scintillating (and relentlessly demanding) portrayal by Ben Miles of Thomas Cromwell, the savvy figure central to both plays. Could this become another Nicholas Nickleby for a company with an impeccable pedigree in turning fiction into thrilling theatre?

That it is fiction, in a different sense of the word, nags in the viewer’s mind as the six-hour traffic on the stage proceeds. “And is it true? and is it true?” John Betjeman’s question concerning Christmas could as well be asked about the matter central to the second of the plays. I mean the accusations of serial adultery and incest that led to the execution of Anne Boleyn (Lydia Leonard), whose stormy passage towards Henry’s matrimonial bed is so thrillingly charted in the first.

The answer in both cases is that we shall never know. Let us be content in respect of Mantel’s work — so brilliantly translated to the stage, under director Jeremy Herrin, by Mike Poulton — to know that hers is a view of momentous events that is entirely consistent with what we know about the workings of the human heart. Such knowledge, of course, has been gained in large part through the plays of the great man, honoured in the theatres of his home town, who brought such lustre to the reign of Henry and Anne’s daughter.

The king himself, shown in all his dangerous fickleness (and steadily developing embonpoint) by Nathaniel Parker, does not appear until fully 30 minutes into the drama, following a careful study of Cromwell’s relationship with his charismatic mentor, Cardinal Wolsey (Paul Jesson). From then on, though, he remains a character as riveting to behold as his principal fixer.

Mr Miles’s Cromwell is a figure more pleasing to the eye than Mantel repeatedly states him to be; conversely, Anne’s lutenist ‘toy boy’ Mark Smeaton is not (with apologies to Joey Batey) the drop-dead gorgeous looker of the novels. Ms Leonard’s Anne is rather more of a manipulative minx than the books show her to be, but others in the rich gallery of characters seem just right. These include Nicholas Day’s thuggish Duke of Norfolk, Nicholas Boulton’s oafish aristo Suffolk and Lucy Briers’s suitably regal Katherine of Aragon. Kill for tickets.

Wolf Hall/Bring Up the Bodies
Swan Theatre, Stratford
Until March 29