Wolf Hall: Season 1 (2015)

Wolf Hall is an adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s pair of Booker Prize winning novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, which detail the rise of Thomas Cromwell (Mark Rylance) in the mid sixteenth-century, from his attachment to Cardinal Wolsey (Jonathan Pryce) to his role as chief minister to Henry VIII (Damian Lewis), where he arranges both the ascent and execution of Anne Boleyn (Claire Foy). It’s a beautiful, mercurial series, shot almost exclusively on location, with natural light, but also employing quite delicate, mobile cinematography to create a mood and atmosphere of radical promiscuity, appropriate to a period in which the very future and identity of England was shaped by the shifting zones between betrothal, marriage, consummation and procreation, and the ways the King chose to inhabit them. In another adaptation, that might make for a study of Henry himself, who somehow remains both married and unmarried – nearly always almost married – for the duration of the series, but, like Mantel, screenwriter Peter Straughan and director Peter Kosminsky seem more interested in this promiscuous, provisional space as a condition and experience of everyday life, or at least everyday aristocratic life. Certainly, Henry’s relationships with Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour and his various mistresses drive the broad strokes of the narrative, but for the most part all the relationships in the series have an element of courtship, even or especially when they’re not erotic or romantic in any immediately discernible way, with at least as much time spent on the approach to conversation as conversation itself. Similarly, every space partakes of the fluid zone around the King, no matter how remote from his actual Court, which feels increasingly mobile and amorphous anyway, as Straughan and Kosminsky beautifully capture the eddying currents of favour and disfavour, the strange and circuitous routes that need to be taken to gain and hold Henry’s regard. In that sense, Rylance is the perfect actor to play Cromwell, the perfect character to seize hold of this period of radical historical and libidinal flux and make it his own – his face is inscrutable but also highly expressive, exuding a privacy and irreducible individuality that often makes him feel like the forefront of the English Renaissance and Reformation more than Henry himself, especially when he’s set up against Anton Lesser’s wonderfully splenetic, astringent depiction of Thomas More. Between them sit the kinds of silences that shape history, convulsive and meditative in the same moment, although it’s Cromwell’s capacity for plainness that always wins out – a plainness of speech, gesture and gaze that’s more mysterious, in the end, than More’s taste for martyred ceremony, let alone the Catholic operatics of a series like The Tudors. For Cromwell, as for most of the characters, interrogation, imprisonment and execution might be just around the corner, but he's uniquely able to claim and occupy the present moment in all its mutability, much like the adaptation itself, which often feels closer to a six-hour film than a miniseries.