When it was announced that Hilary Mantel's Booker-winning Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies were going to be adapted into a stage production by the Royal Shakespeare Company, there was never a doubt in my mind that it would be brilliantly done. Mantel's intelligent and vivid re-imagining of Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII's Tudor court was made for the stage.
The only thing was that the books were so long, weren't they? and I'm not sure we could call them the lightest reads either... so the plays were bound to be hideously long and a little 'heavy'. I wasn't convinced the more political side would translate that well - potentially a little dry... When I went to see Wolf Hall in Shakespeare's birth-town of Stratford last week, though, I'm pleased to say that I was completely and utterly wrong.
What I should have remembered was when I heard Hilary Mantel reading from Bring Up the Bodies at the Southbank Centre a couple of years ago. She brought out all the humour in her writing that I had embarrassingly missed somehow when reading it myself. It was clear from the moment the play started that Mantel was written all over the screenplay. Her heavy involvement in the production has resulted in a play that was both clever and accessible, and really very funny from start to finish. Be it Cromwell's crafty wit or his Shakespearean clown-like servant Joseph, the whole Swan Theatre regularly erupted into laughter. One of them so much that they seemed to be quietly dying of a coughing fit in the third row...
On the subject of the audience, it was a little, umm, predictable shall we say. I'm pretty sure I brought the average age down by about 40 years for starters. Admittedly it was a matinee in the middle of the week in Stratford but I do hope when the plays move to London later in the year that everyone goes to see it.
The only criticism I had, and to be honest it's more of a question mark than a criticism, was that I felt there could have been a bit more of Cromwell's brutality. Even though one of the main ambitions of Mantel's trilogy is to change our perspective on Cromwell a little bit and imagine him from a different perspective, there is no doubt that Cromwell could be a cruel bully sometimes, whether his actions were understandable or not. I felt that this was slightly underplayed, not absent, but perhaps too subtle in places. Perhaps Bring Up the Bodies grows this side of his character a bit more. And maybe make him a bit uglier... Ben Miles is very nice on the eye - pretty sure Crommers was not...
Anyway, it's really really good. So go see it. Do it. Go. And if you're really keen and, you know, rich - book Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies back to back! I wish I had. Historical inaccuracies aside, there really are worse things than a double-bill of Ben Miles...
Other related posts:
No comments:
Post a Comment