A DARKER THOMAS CROMWELL 

        Edward Bennett as Thomas Cromwell is a proper thug:  everyone’s memory of the  HR-outplacement weasel who starts the sacking meeting with soft-soap about having always admired you;  the one who,  forced to drop one charge,  finds another. “It has to be done by law. It’s a matter of finding the right law. Or making one” he says firmly , while Sir Thomas More defies HenryVIII’s desire to have his divorce approved by the most decent man in court.     So,  fresh from Rylance breaking our heart in Wolf Hall on TV with as Hilary Mantel’s preferred  Machiavellian version of  “Crom”,  it’s a grand time for a moment of revisionism as  Jonathan Church revives this classic.   Robert Bolt’s celebrated play made Paul Scofield’s name in 1960,    scooped an Oscar  in the 1966 film and therefore has never quite gone away.   

        And watching this elegant production, framed by Simon Higlett in linenfold-panelling, glimpses of dungeon and artfully lit suggestions of the river beyond to Chelsea and Richmond, I kept thinking how very much it was of its time:  a product of the Cold War years of granitic Soviet persecutions.   It is a drily angry, passionate epic of personal conscience, loyalty and the uses and abuses of Law.  It suits our age very well,  reminds us of Alexei Navalny, Jamal Khashoggi and  others who did not bend conscience to tyranny.   Not to mention our global problems with free speech and thought; at one point the exasperated  Cromwell explains that Henry,  newly married to Anne Boleyn,    “is a man of conscience” – so can’t bear being disapproved of by anyone or the language they use.  His  Chancellor  must either explicitly bless his marriage,  or  be destroyed.  

         Martin Shaw is at the play’s heart as Sir Thomas More, a silver-maned lion, patriarch, lawyer and devout Christian who, from the first conversations with Nicholas Day’s pragmatic Cardinal Wolsey  clearly sees that Henry VIII’s determination to get a male heir by ditching his first wife is politically reasonable – without one the nation could split again, as in the Yorkist wars.  But divorce will lead inevitably to a rift with Rome and the whole ancient structure of the Church which  More has grown  in and believes to hold the truth.    Yet he thinks he is “not the stuff of which martyrs are made”,  and manages for a while to believe that there is safety in silence:  which of course there is not, since his passive-aggressive refusal to sign the Oath of Succession bring him down in the end.   And his family:  Abigail Cruttenden is a spirited Alice, his wife, Annie Kingsnorth their daughter; the domestic scenes  are beautifully achieved, whether the women are domestically  impatient over his  stubbbornness condemning them to “parsnips and stinking mutton“ and burning bracken on the hearth, or in the final jail scenes, which are heartbreaking.  

       The first half I admit dismayed me slightly:  it’s a slow-build by modern theatrical standards, but Bolt’s framing of all the story by The Common Man –  Gary Wilmot amiably moving from steward to boatman to  jailer in different hats  – gives moments of acerbic cynical realism to steer it along. And after the interval – which he informs us with a sigh covers two years of history – the tension mounts as it should. Building fear focuses ever more tightly around  More, moral  grandeur  shining  through outward destruction.   Shaw does more than justice  to the great polemic moments,  crumbling only to humility in the last prison meeting with his wife and daughter.  His timing is beautiful; the final reproof to the ratlike Rich (Calum Finlay splendidly evoking a courtier’s littleness)  produces one of the classic laughs of relief from the audience.  

        But all through there are some  wonderful minor lines that lift this intelligent, adult play to gaiety: mostly from the magnificent More himself, who is very dry at times,  but also in moments like the French Ambassador’s confrontation with Alice More:  a thwarted grunt of. “For sheer barbarity, commend me to an Englishwoman of a certain class!”.  Greg Wallace would understand.

         It’s touring for months – details below – and well worth finding.  And such in the end was the  reality to me  of Sir Thomas  that I  remembered something else:  his  last letter before  execution, written with charcoal on cloth as Cromwell  took away all his books and writing materials.  It  isn’t in the play,  but  offer to anyone who hasn’t met it before the lines to his daughter Margaret:  

       “Farewell, my dear child, and pray for me, and I shall for you and all your friends, that we may merrily meet in heaven”.   

Box office theatreroyal.org.uk. To 25 Feb

TOUR DATES 

28 January – 1 February Chichester Festival Theatre
4 – 8 February Malvern Theatre
11 – 15 February Cheltenham Everyman
18 – 22 February Oxford Playhouse
25 – 29 February Yvonne Arnaud Guildford
4 – 8 March Canterbury Marlowe
11 – 15 March Richmond Theatre

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