– Buckle Up –
by Carol Midgley | The Times | November 5, 2024
Four out of Five Stars
Can it really be almost a decade since Claire Foy’s Anne Boleyn was led trembling to the scaffold in whipping wind to part company with her head? What a terrible scene, so brilliantly executed in Wolf Hall, the TV adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s historical novel. But don’t worry. You get to see it all over again at the start of The Mirror and the Light, a reminder of how the last series ended in 2015 and what we’ll be missing in the next: namely Foy’s masterly, complex performance.
Anne’s interactions with the wily Thomas Cromwell (a mesmerising Mark Rylance) were one of Wolf Hall’s highlights but in The Mirror and the Light Rylance inevitably shoulders most of the heavy lifting, appearing in virtually every scene of the three hour-long episodes that I have seen (there are six).
We see him first at the height of his powers but then starting to irritate Henry VIII (Damian Lewis looking more fat-padded out and manspreading for England), which is never ideal. Our insight into Cromwell’s troubled conscience comes via sequences in which he talks to a “vision” of Cardinal Wolsey (Jonathan Pryce), whom he fears he let down. He dreams of Anne’s bloodied, severed head, as well he might.
Peter Kosminsky again delivers sumptuous television, authenticity in every turn of a courtier’s velvet cuff or a lady’s gable hood, the looks and glances between characters as telling as the dialogue in this political snake pit.
Some viewers may initially find this story arc less compelling: the demure Jane Seymour is not as interesting as Anne, though Kate Phillips gives a convincing turn as a meek young rabbit slightly caught in the headlights. Henry VIII quickly marries Jane. “Such freshness, such delicacy … I have come out of hell into heaven,” he oozes. But, increasingly a testy, angry, paranoid and fatter figure, he quickly seems to tire of her, especially since she is “slow” to become “fruitful”. “Have I married a fool?” he asks.
Jane worries that “If the wife doesn’t take pleasure in the act she will not get a child.” (Anne said that sex with Henry was like being “slobbered over by a mastiff pup”, so good luck with that.)
At this stage Henry isn’t happy. “I’ve bastardised both my daughters, I have no heir and, as I understand, no hope of one. My subjects are in rebellion, my coffers are empty and my cradle empty too.” But, as we know, that’s about to change.
Rylance’s Cromwell is, again, magnificent — layered, tormented, nuanced and often sympathetic despite his “evil” reputation, though his old lady hairdo puts me in mind of Mavis Riley from Coronation Street (the newsagent years). There is an excellent scene in a nunnery after which Cromwell is weeping and broken, pain chiselled into his face (though this pain is nothing. If his famous, grisly fate is depicted, I’m not sure I want to watch it). Rumours start to mount that he has designs to marry Lady Mary, Henry’s daughter (Lilit Lesser) — very dangerous gossip indeed.
There are new faces, such as Timothy Spall as the furious, scowling Duke of Norfolk and Harriet Walter as Lady Margaret Pole. But it is Rylance, husky-voiced and brooding, who makes this series, along with Lewis’s ever more tetchy Henry.
Wolsey’s “ghost” advises Cromwell of his tricky situation: like all bad bosses, the king will take credit for all Cromwell’s good ideas and blame him for all his own bad ones. “When fortune turns against you, you will feel the lash,” he says. Buckle up.
Read the rest of the original article at The Times