– Most Riveting and Richly Textured Drama –
by Johanna Thomas-Corr | The Times | November 10, 2024
The director Peter Kosminsky reveals how his detailed email exchanges with the author were a goldmine when making the BBC drama The Mirror and the Light.
When Hilary Mantel was writing The Mirror and the Light, the final novel in her enormous Wolf Hall trilogy, she would email Peter Kosminsky the book in 100-page installments and ask for his opinion. Kosminsky won a BAFTA for directing the BBC’s powerful TV adaptation of the first two Wolf Hall books and was already lined up to adapt the third. Still, he said, he felt “intimidated” at her requests. “She is the only genius I’ve ever met,” he says.
Mantel’s dazzling Tudor epic about the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell, the fixer-in-chief in Henry VIII’s bloody court, had become a cultural phenomenon, redefining the scope of historical fiction and rescuing the genre from bodice-ripping naffness. In turn, Kosminsky’s intelligent 2015 screen version, with Mark Rylance as the inscrutable Cromwell, or “Crum”, and Damian Lewis as the lusty tyrant king, attracted four million viewers — the most a BBC2 drama had drawn in a decade.
But this meant that her eagerly awaited third book was being heralded like a royal birth. “What was most terrifying was that she was demanding my feedback. She’s a double Booker-winning novelist and I’m … me,” Kosminsky says, laughing.
The Mirror and the Light, which arrived in March 2020, was widely acclaimed as the perfect conclusion to the greatest British literary achievement of the century. However, it’s been a long and rocky road to make the TV adaptation. Filming was initially delayed because of Covid. Then in September 2022 Mantel died suddenly and unexpectedly after suffering a stroke. She was 70.
“Every death is a catastrophe but this one particularly so,” Kosminsky recalls. “She was a friend and quite apart from anything else, I was really grieving. Then it struck me that this was her last completed novel and that the Wolf Hall trilogy had clearly been the creative acme of her life. The weight of responsibility, which had already been quite intense, doubled, then trebled.”
So, eight years on from the previous series, does his latest adaptation live up to such heavy expectations?
Yes. Resoundingly so. Having watched all six hour-long episodes, I can say that it’s one of the most riveting and richly textured TV dramas I’ve seen on the BBC since … well, Wolf Hall.
And not just because of the sumptuous costumes of velvet, pearls and gold brocade. Or the ageing British thesps (Rylance, Jonathan Pryce, Timothy Spall and Alex Jennings) with faces like ruined castles. Or even the young women (Lilit Lesser and Summer Richards) with their jewel-framed bosoms who must charm and flatter the gouty, capricious king (played with extra menace by Lewis).
The abusive relationship between the workaholic Cromwell and despotic Henry, along with all the nasty court machinations, makes for a tense, brutal drama. HBO’s Succession looks positively pale and bloodless in comparison.
Yet in some respects the drama’s flickering candlelight, creaky floorboards and spooky choral music set a subtler and more restrained mood than Mantel evoked in her novel. The book is often boisterously comic, with dialogue that sounds like Armando Iannucci channelling Shakespeare. I recall Henry’s advisers dismissing northern rebels as “arsewipes in the shires … waving pitchforks”.
Peter Straughan (whose previous work includes the film Frank and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) has written a skilful script that has thankfully preserved Mantel’s jokes about Lincolnshire and bawdy asides about the king’s “bedwork” — including Jane Rochford’s report that her sister-in-law Anne Boleyn described sex with Henry as like being “slobbered over by a mastiff pup”.
In some scenes, Straughan has taken large chunks of the book verbatim, notably in the final devastating episode, which features Cromwell’s nearly hour-long interrogation.
But what’s perhaps most surprising about the drama is how unhurried it feels given how much Straughan and Kosminsky were forced to leave out. I suggest that in the age of TV streamers producing epically long series, it feels a bit meagre for the BBC to have allowed only six episodes for an 890-page novel. Kosminsky says six hours “gave us the canvas we needed” but admits it was tough to film the whole series in 17 weeks. “There is never as much money as you hope and the schedule is so demanding.”
A winter shoot in cold stately homes and churches across England was “uncomfortable” but it gave the series a darker, more sinister feel. Kosminsky says the starry cast were “genuinely thrilled” to be back together — although one of his biggest challenges was that it had been eight years since the first adaptation. The Mirror and the Light opens seconds after they had left off in series one, with the beheading of Anne Boleyn. Kosminsky says that because Rylance and Lewis looked “a lot older” they were forced to digitally age flashbacks of them from the last series to smooth the transition. “I don’t want the only thing the audience takes from those flashbacks to be, ‘Oh God, he was a lot younger back then.’”
Reassembling many of the same actors was also a fraught business. Bernard Hill, who played Cromwell’s other nemesis, the snarling foul-mouthed Duke of Norfolk, died in May, while Mark Gatiss, who had played the bitchy bishop Stephen Gardiner, was tied to a successful run in the West End as John Gielgud. But constraint fostered creativity. Jennings is now equally creepy as Gardiner while Spall, who looks like a droopy-faced rogue from a Dr Seuss cartoon, takes on the vulgar Norfolk.
Adapting the novel was not just difficult because of its length and the number of flashbacks but also because so much of the story takes place in Cromwell’s head. And as Mantel said, he’s a man “as twisty as a screw”. Kosminsky believes there were a number of ways to interpret his character from the novel but with Mantel’s approval they decided to tell a story of a man who wasn’t so much a victim of events but who “lost his mojo” in the last four years of his life. A crucial turning point for Cromwell comes halfway through the series when he meets Cardinal Wolsey’s illegitimate daughter, Dorothea, a nun at Shaftesbury Abbey. To reveal any more would spoil the story, but I will just say that the distinctive score does a great deal of the heavy lifting in conveying Cromwell’s inner turmoil as Henry VIII turns against him. “Dorothea’s theme”, sung in a high, ethereal soprano voice, foretells his doom.
But for all the sense of inevitable descent, the drama still feels spontaneous. You feel that these 500-year-old historical figures don’t necessarily know what their future holds. Mantel always said that Cromwell’s journey into the heart of government was a universal story about hierarchical power that was pertinent to any age: “You’ll find [Cromwell] in politics, you’ll find him in armies, you’ll find him in the mafia.” Her genius was in taking someone who had always been viewed as a villain and forcing us to reconsider him from all angles.
Kosminsky says: “It’s important and refreshing in such polarised times as now, when people reach for hate so easily, to remember that very few people are completely black or white.” He resists any allegorical interpretations of his latest series but does admit how “extraordinarily relevant” it feels in its depiction of a dictator. “And more broadly with the rise of authoritarianism and populism.”
And why are we so endlessly fascinated by the Tudors? Kosminsky thinks it’s because “they were the first people who began to live like we live”, which is all to do with the innovations in glass-making that changed the design of homes. “They stopped eating, sleeping and drinking in great communal halls and started to live in homes with large windows that contained smaller private rooms. That sense of them as private individuals, able to operate away from the communal gaze, makes them recognisable to us.”
Mantel was unusually involved in the successful Royal Shakespeare Company adaptation of Wolf Hall and in advising the TV drama. She said she wanted it to feel as though it was portraying real people who were just muddling through the next five minutes. This is why she specifically requested to work with Kosminsky, who uses hand-held cameras and a cinema vérité style that is more often seen in documentaries.
Intriguingly, though, this changed the way she wrote her final book. “It speaks to Hilary’s openness and generosity — and I suppose confidence — that she said to me, ‘I’ve been very influenced by the TV series.’ When you read her description of the execution of Anne Boleyn at the beginning of The Mirror and the Light, I think you can see the influence of a television interpretation.”
Mantel borrowed storyboarding techniques from TV to work out the power dynamics between her characters, allowing them just two exchanges each per scene. “When I came down to that core of information that had been imparted, I would then work it back into novel form.”
When he came to make the final adaptation, Kosminsky found his detailed email exchanges with the author to be a “goldmine” of material. Meanwhile, he “actively sought the feedback” of Mantel’s beloved husband, Gerald McEwen, sending him the scripts and the rushes every day after filming. McEwen refused to pass comment at the time, not wanting to interfere, but having seen the finished result he is, apparently, delighted.
“He’s a shy guy, a lovely man,” Kosminksy says. “They were literally packing their bags for Ireland to start a new life when she had the stroke … I was on holiday when he phoned me — I’m going to get upset now — he said, ‘Peter, Hilary has died. You’ll hear about it in the next couple of days but I wanted to tell you myself.’ He broke down. It was absolutely heartbreaking. I was standing there with tears pouring down my face and then I had to go to speak on the radio. I just wanted to climb into a corner and cry.”
Mantel’s death naturally loomed large over the whole production. Kosminsky laments “all those novels that she could have written that we’ll never get to read”. But she leaves behind a still potent body of work and a TV series that will give her an even greater reach — if that’s still possible.
One of the reasons we cherish this trilogy so much is because we know she poured so much of herself into these books. And just as it would be a mistake to gulp down the book, you should not binge the TV series. Remember what it cost for Mantel to create this world. I particularly love her account of how she would act out the scenes alone in her office. People would have been shocked, she said, if they could have witnessed her facial expressions: “I do act everything and consequently I’m exhausted by the end of the day,” she said. “I feel like whatever I’ve written, I’ve lived.”
Read the rest of the original article at The Times