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"Wolf Hall" tonight (spoilers)

Posted by:	lordofspeech 11:46 pm EDT 05/07/15
In reply to:	re: Weird credit in Ben Miles' Playbill bio for "Wolf Hall" - Thom915 10:45 am EDT 05/07/15

Fast-paced, plot-dense, with an interestingly greyed-down pallette for its overall design, the show is a wonderful object lesson for directors in transitions. Scenes melt into scenes with astute, abrupt shifts in lighting and tone. For my money, though, except for the two Henry VIII scenes where's he's in his nightshirt possessed with debilitating visions, the play never stops long enough to let us into anyone's heart. Mantel's novels made a conscious choice to stay far away from the inner workings of Ann Boleyn, but she tried to give us a complex portrait of Cromwell. In this, he serves rather like a sturdy narrator without the radical dysfunctions of his past which Mantel showed had twisted/formed him. And why bring Catherine of Aragon on again and again and rob the actress of portraying her complexities? Wolsey's part is well-played and well-written, but the rest is quite surface. Nonetheless admirable overall, if you like compressed exposition well delivered and those masterful transitions.

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re: "Wolf Hall" tonight (spoilers)

Posted by:	writerkev 12:26 pm EDT 05/08/15
In reply to:	"Wolf Hall" tonight (spoilers) - lordofspeech 11:46 pm EDT 05/07/15

I can't disagree with you. But when the plot is so full of incident and food for thought, sometimes that's enough. At least it was for me.

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