11 November 2024

Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light is a masterclass in restraint

In this second series, based on the final novel in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy, the mood is hushed. What volumes are spoken by the way a man doffs his cap.

By Rachel Cooke

Tyrants on our minds, the arrival of the Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light is well-timed, for all that the wait for it has been very long. In his finery, so luxuriantly cumbersome it swaddles him like a baby, Henry VIII (Damien Lewis) is at once ridiculous and terrifying. If the king at this point struggles to walk, a leg gatepost-stiff with gout, his temper grows ever more vigorously peripatetic; not even Thomas Cromwell (Mark Rylance) can always anticipate where next it might land, eager to separate another head from another body. And yet, the mood overall is hushed. In the rooms through which we’re led – so many rooms, and every threshold a cliff edge – the conversation is sotto voce, and restricted to a bare minimum. For feeling, as for apprehension, one must look as well as listen. What volumes are spoken by the manner in which a man doffs his cap or bends his knee.

This second (and last) series is based on the final novel in Hilary Mantel’s Tudor trilogy. When it begins, it is May, 1536: a grave month, blood all around. Anne Boleyn is executed on May 19, and days later, Henry marries Jane Seymour (Kate Philips), whose skin is as pale as snowdrops. What is she in for? Nothing good, as any fool knows. Lady Rochford (Lydia Leonard) tells Cromwell that Anne said congress with the King was like being “slobbered over by a mastiff pup” – though a little drool at this point seems worth putting up with. It’s when Henry isn’t drooling that his Queen should worry. Jane, however, believes she must do more than merely endure his night-time visits. Women who do not enjoy the act, she has heard, are unlikely to bear sons.

Cromwell, now Lord of the Privy Seal, listens to these intimacies, his face carefully arranged to suggest a bewildered sympathy. But the brain is working overtime. Mary (Lilit Lesser), the king’s daughter, must be made to swear an oath of allegiance that recognises him as head of the church if she’s to be saved, and something must be done about his niece, Margaret (Agnes O’Casey), who has enraged him with a secret betrothal to an uncle of Anne Boleyn’s. Reginald Pole, Henry’s exiled kinsman, has written a book, a denunciation of Henry, and his stubborn, spiky mother, Margaret (Harriet Walter), would rather work her tapestry than repudiate him. So much business to conclude – the latter word being, in this sanguinary realm, an obscenity of a euphemism.

But I’m not here to give you a precis, and none of this would be gripping in lesser hands (Tudor telly is almost inevitably bad). We owe a lot to Wolf Hall’s writer, Peter Straughan, whose script is restrained, blessedly non-explicatory and relies on silence for its fullest effects. Peter Kosminsky again directs, and though he remains an unlikely choice for this historical drama, the result is alchemical. I recently re-watched The Project, his still stunningly good 2002 series about a group of Labour Party activists (it recounts the rise of Blairism, and stars a young Matthew Macfadyen), and I recognised in it the same quality he deploys in Wolf Hall: patience. Kosminsky is content for things to unfold – jeopardy, he has learned, loiters in unexpected corners – and he trusts his audience to understand that even when nothing seems to be happening, everything is. In this case, the very particles of the air are replete with murderous intent.

The performances, too, are uniformly wonderful, great actors in bonnets and French hoods wheeled on quite happily for a single episode (Jonathan Pryce, Timothy Spall, Harriet Walter). Lewis, of course, does his thing: the very rings on his fingers emanate entitlement. But it’s Rylance who holds us, breathless. In the nine years since Wolf Hall was last on our screens, he has aged a little, and this proves useful to him, weariness as well as wisdom now apparent whenever he hefts his heavy, fur-trimmed coat more closely about his shoulders. It’s amazing to me the way minute changes in his expression easily convey moral profundities, the queasy inward dramas of a man who is complicit in terror and despotism – and before God, too. “How do you remake your reputation with the dead?” Cromwell asks his son, Rafe (Thomas Brodie-Sangster). A candle flickers in the ensuing quiet. Only his eyes tell us that this question has no decent answer.