The House of Cards-like scheming of Cromwell, Wolsey, Stephen Gardiner (Mark Gatiss) and the Duke of Norfolk (Bernard Hill) is testy but not yet captivating. Hilary Mantel twice won the Booker Prize, for her best-selling novel Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies.The final novel of the Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, debuted at 1 on the New York Times bestseller list and won critical acclaim around the globe. Lewis’s Henry may be as bright and bulbous as a Holbein portrait but Cromwell wears the sombre black of an acolyte.įor those who’ve not swallowed the 1,104 pages of the books, this opener might have proved puzzling, even though Straughan’s dialogue is fairly surgical. This is a taut, gloomy production, one that’s (obviously) a leap away from the aesthetics of the most recent Henry TV drama, the glossy The Tudors. The slightly club-footed flashbacks to abuse at the hands of his father do the job of explaining the defensive wall between Cromwell and the world, but Rylance’s skill is such that even as he keeps a straight face at the death of his family you can almost see Cromwell’s pain perspiring. The hour acts as the genesis tale of his Robert Moses-like ascent to power at the side of King Henry VIII (Damian Lewis, who only appears here briefly).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |