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"Damian Lewis gives the best portrayal of Henry VIII, absolutely brilliant"
" Wolf Hall is quality television, brilliant set, costumes and performances. Master class acting from Mark Rylance and Damian Lewis."
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“Damian Lewis’s brilliantly wooden, strutting Henry.”
again and again fiver stars all over!!
The tense third episode of the BBC’s Wolf Hall confirmed it as a stellar political drama, says Tim Martin
The gloves had to come off at some point. The third episode of Wolf Hall (BBC Two) opened as Thomas More (Anton Lesser) primly delivered a homily to a Protestant heretic under torture. Cut to Mark Rylance’s Thomas Cromwell, gazing at a tapestry of a woman with fire under her feet and a sword at her throat. Cut again to Cromwell, in audience with Anne Boleyn herself. By this stage in the drama the queen-in-waiting (Claire Foy) was playing a dangerous game, but, tragically, straying out of her depth.
Director Peter Kosminsky and writer Peter Straughan may be filleting Hilary Mantel’s source novels to fit them into six episodes, but they are doing a great job of keeping the books’ bleak suggestiveness, their ear for things not spoken. When Cromwell asked Anne to intercede on behalf of a prisoner, she gave him a telling reply: “People should say whatever will keep them alive.”
Wolf Hall is getting better, and darker, with each episode. (Darker in both senses, in fact: I love the Barry Lyndon candlelight in the night scenes but if your LCD television struggles to render dark tones, beware.) As Cromwell floats up the ranks of Henry’s court, Mark Rylance shows us the steel behind his sorrowful Holbein gaze and the measured, civil tones. “If Thomas More came anywhere near you,” he promised one of his lieutenants, “I’d drag him out of his court and beat his head on the cobbles of Westminster.” When a hapless courtier stumbled across Mary Boleyn (Charity Wakefield) about to kiss Cromwell in the dark – a plotline given rather more emphasis in this adaptation than in the book – our solemn councillor had a knife at the intruder’s throat before you could blink. And when Anne’s toffish former suitor Harry Percy (Harry Lloyd) tried to make trouble, Cromwell gave him short shrift. “The world is not run from where you think it is,” he said, looking almost sad.
This episode ended with More sacked, Anne crowned and excommunication lurking around the corner for Damian Lewis’s brilliantly wooden, strutting Henry. Straughan and Kosminsky have shunted a lot of historical detail to the side – so much that at times I wondered if the series presumes too heavily on our knowledge of the period. No matter; this is stellar political drama, with a thrillingly delicate feel for the weight of words. “I was always desired,” said Anne at the end. “But now I’m valued, you see. And that’s different.”
The Telegraph
Peter Straughan, whose ways we’re getting to know, likes to work his episodes around hinted themes. Often it’s only with hindsight we can pick them up, but it’s one of the joys of his richly satisfying (so far) adaptation.
The third instalment opens in 1531. Two years on. The camera lingers a minute or two in close up on the face of Thomas More, now lord chancellor of England, who is reading aloud in Latin with the ease of someone for whom it is a first language.
An abrupt shift across the room: a man is being put to the rack. He groans as the wheel is turned. It is Thomas Cromwell’s barrister, James Bainham, who has gone over to Tyndale and cannot “unbelieve”, even as his joints crack. But is it Bainham or his master who is More’s target? He has used his office to intercept letters to Tyndale. He believes Cromwell to be a man whose “faith is for purchase”. It is Cromwell who should be racked and cracked.
The scene jumps again: now we witness an audience between Cromwell and Catherine, in which she is informed of the king’s bill to make himself head of the church and her an ex-queen. “I did not think he would send a man like you to tell me,” she says. A lackey without so much as a title to his name.
Standing alongside the seated (still throned) Catherine is a pale-faced girl, staggering – the Princess Mary. She has, she whispers, the “woman’s disorder”. Let her sit, says Cromwell, contradicting her mother’s command that she stand. This, of course, is the girl who will grow to be Bloody Mary, the ruthless burner of Protestant heretics. The episode will end with Bainham screaming at the stake as the flames lick around him. We recall the pale-faced girl.
He may be a commoner but, as Mary Boleyn tartly observes, Cromwell is “the man who writes the laws”. He carries with him a leather tube for documents and scrolls (communications with Tyndale he destroys). What did Don Corleone sayabout the man with the briefcase versus the man with the gun?
The prelude to the “Great Matter” – English independence – is the bill. A document that More, fatefully, declines to sign. Parliament, under the eye of the king and the now-no-less-sinister Cromwell, flock like sheep to the right side of the chamber. There is, after the vote, an acidic encounter with Stephen Gardiner. The king tells his men to forget their differences and pull together. For him. But that is not Cromwell’s style – and certainly not with Gardiner.
Master Cromwell is now wealthy – but he wants a “job”, he tells Mary, who passes the request to Anne, who passes it to the king. Nothing extravagant or time-consuming: master of the royal jewels will be sufficient.
But he must earn that rise in station by fixing a little embarrassment. Anne’s old lover, Harry Percy, has been putting it about that, all those years ago – before Wolsey put a stop to it – there was a “precontract” between him and Anne and “freedoms” with her person. Her “notorious virginity”, of course, is a necessary part of the great matters that are going forward.
The Guardian
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