– Masterstroke in a Magnificent Drama –
by Christopher Stevens | Daily Mail | November 10, 2024
Five out of Five Stars
Courtiers who should be telling him, ‘With these Ferrero Rocher chocolate balls, you are spoiling us!’ are instead issuing veiled death threats.
Diplomat Eustace Chapuys is a crucial figure, because it is his detailed letters that give historians such an insight into the court of Good King Hal.
But whichever actor plays him — Mathieu Amalric in Wolf Hall, Anthony Brophy in The Tudors, and many others — he is depicted as a perpetual innocent, appalled by the cruelty of the English and quaking in his elegant boots.
As Wolf Hall returned, Thomas Cromwell (Mark Rylance) cornered him during a thunderstorm. With every flash of lightning, Chapuys was zapped with another demand from the king. He looked like he wanted to crawl under a bed and hide like a kitten.
The torment continues throughout the series for our man from Madrid. Henry and his brutish chief adviser snigger that the unmarried Chapuys is ‘no judge of women’.
And in one tense exchange, Cromwell issues a blunt threat: ‘Ambassadors have been murdered in the street before.’
Rylance’s brilliance is to convey Cromwell’s thuggish menace without resorting to physical bullying. One of his lackeys, Thomas Wriothesley (Harry Melling), reveals in a later episode, ‘My Lord Cromwell once broke a man’s jaw with a single blow.’
At 5’8”, Mark Rylance is a slight figure who looks as though in real life he might struggle to snap a KitKat, but he has such presence, such intensity, that we believe he could split a skull open with the sheer malevolence of his glare.
He’s especially effective when at his most impassive. Instead of snarling or raging, he allows his face to remain absolutely still to communicate his displeasure.
Even the king is not immune — Cromwell doffs his cap and bows, but if he disapproves of the royal decree, he doesn’t so much as blink. That silence is eloquent, forceful enough to make Henry himself reword his thoughts.
Now that Anne Boleyn is dead (despatched by a prancing French swordsman in the opening scene), Wolf Hall lacks a powerful female character.
The king’s older daughter, Mary (Lilit Lesser) is a broken reed. Harriet Walter, as the conniving Lady Margaret Pole, had only one scene, though she made the most of it, dueling with Cromwell like an Olympic fencer.
Kate Phillips, as Her Insipid Majesty Jane Seymour, is hampered by the Queen’s timid soppiness.
She makes even foppish Chapuys look tough. Without Claire Foy as Anne, there’s no one brave or clever enough to challenge Cromwell’s machinations.
Peter Straughan’s adaptation of Dame Hilary Mantel’s final novel gets around this by reintroducing Cardinal Wolsey (Jonathan Pryce) — a ghost lurking by the curtains in Cromwell’s study.
It’s one more masterstroke in a magnificent drama.
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