The play's the thing

The long-awaited tale of Thomas Cromwell’s downfall is narrative theatre at its best, but the new Hamlet underwhelms

- Michael Billington

SINCE theatre bounced back, we have been bombarded with blockbuster musicals. I’m not complaining, but it is a relief to go to a West End theatre, the Gielgud, to see a play about a pivotal moment in British history: The Mirror and the Light, adapted by the book’s author, Hilary Mantel, and the actor Ben Miles.

I have sharp memories of the stage version of the first two novels in the trilogy, Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, as I crawled up to Stratford-on-Avon to see them from a hospital bed seven years ago. They unforgettably charted Cromwell’s rise from blacksmith’s son to king’s seemingly indispensable counsellor. The new play starts in 1540 with an imprisoned Cromwell facing a trumped-up charge of treason and then tracks back four years to show his spectacular fall from grace.

This is narrative theatre at its best: even if you know the outline of the story, you want to know the whys and wherefores. ‘When you reach the top of the ladder, where do you go?’ Cromwell himself asks. You realise his descent was accelerated by his friendship with Mary Tudor, Henry VIII’s fiercely Catholic daughter, by his role in suppressing the Northern monasteries and, above all, by his reckless promotion of the detested Anna of Cleves as Henry’s fourth wife. ‘Make me happy, Crom,’ says Henry; when Cromwell fails to do that, his fate is sealed.

It’s an extravagant comparison, but the difference between this play and its predecessors is akin to that between the second and first parts of Shakespeare’s