Despite rebellion at home, traitors plotting abroad and the threat of invasion testing Henry's regime to breaking point, Cromwell's robust imagination sees a new country in the mirror of the future. Cromwell is a man with only his wits to rely on he has no great family to back him, no private army. The blacksmith's son from Putney emerges from the spring's bloodbath to continue his climb to power and wealth, while his formidable master, Henry VIII, settles to short-lived happiness with his third queen, Jane Seymour. As her remains are bundled into oblivion, Thomas Cromwell breakfasts with the victors. Anne Boleyn is dead, decapitated in the space of a heartbeat by a hired French executioner. 'If you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?' England, May 1536. The Sunday Times bestseller Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction Longlisted for the Booker Prize 'It is a book not read, but lived' Telegraph 'Her Cromwell novels are, for my money, the greatest English novels of this century' Observer The bestselling sequel to Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, the stunning conclusion to Hilary Mantel's Man Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall trilogy. This is all very fine, but there’s no grief, no great release at the end, just a dull sense of a historical juggernaut juddering to a halt.Īt the Gielgud theatre, London, until 23 January.Paperback.

Jane Seymour and Mary Tudor (Melissa Allan) are virtuous triangles, while Rosanna Adams’ refreshing Anna of Cleves is a resolute, and perfect, square.

The costumes enact a commentary of their own on the vagaries of the body politic: Nicholas Boulton’s wayward Duke of Suffolk sports ruched breeches, in pointed contrast with the mothy velvet of Nick Woodeson’s pompous Duke of Norfolk. The beaky masks of all the aristocratic revellers mirror an earlier shadow play of the scythes and swords of the Pilgrimage of Grace, the popular uprising that was the start of Cromwell’s fall from grace. Christopher Oram’s monumental concrete set, which at first seemed a blockade against the very porousness that is the key to Cromwell’s genius, is criss-crossed with light as the court dissolves into a ghastly masquerade. After the death in childbirth of Jane Seymour, the pace quickens, the tone darkens and the production belatedly finds its mojo.

The mirror and the light trilogy