Wolf Hall

An event. .... Rylance’s Cromwell is an astonishing mix of empathy, doom and hope. .... The dialogue is fluid and of its time, so much so that you forget someone wrote it (Peter Straughan did), or that it was directed (by Peter Kosminsky).

Wolf Hall really is one of the great pleasures of the small screen this year, even if it doesn't initially make much of an effort (like Cromwell) to curry your favor. But stick with this one. The rewards are considerable.

This excellent six-part series brings the statesman's [Thomas Cromwell's] shady story to light with wit, empathy, and even surprise. [3 Apr 2015, p.59]

It is the epitome of slow drama, with action taking place off-screen while intentional silences wreak havoc in the hollow Tudor halls. The miniseries pays off along the way, particularly with Rylance’s extraordinary performance, and it also accumulates into something gripping in the last three episodes.

Bar a few stodgy lulls, from the two episodes (of six) I’ve seen, this second series crackles with tension, driving forward the busy plot points: succession, ambition, peril, absolutism, religious turmoil, omnipresent female powerlessness and fear.

Scripter Peter Straughan masterfully hits almost all the right notes in this fictionalized account of Cromwell.... The stage actor doesn’t convey the cunning with which Mantel imbues her protagonist. At times his lawyer seems a bit thick. At the close of next week, however, Cromwell--and Rylance--find their footing.

Lewis’s contained, preternaturally magnetic performance is as sure an embodiment as you could imagine of the force of a powerful monarch. It has an effect on the show that is both historically authentic and dramatically problematic: When Lewis is offscreen, we, like Cromwell and the other courtiers, are anxiously waiting to see what he will do next. The prodigious Rylance is fine, but Cromwell’s role in “The Mirror and the Light” involves a preponderance of rueful staring into space.