Wolf Hall/Bring Up The Bodies

The Swan Theatre,
Stratford-Upon-Avon

4 Stars

The RSC deserve nothing but praise for taking on the dramatisation of Hilary Mantel's epic, prize-winning novels which trace the career of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's enabler in the monarch's determination to discard wives who could not produce a son and heir.

With this much-heralded production, the RSC faces two major problems.

Their "house dramatist" is, after all, the playwright who created the world's greatest historical drama and there is a tendency for the theatrical adaptation of novels to sink under the weight of narrative detail.

This enormous all-round task potentially may have ended in disappointing anti-climax but Mike Poulton's adaptation and Jeremy Herrin's production, with the magnificent support of a huge cast and creative team, broadly succeed.

The two plays can stand separately but Wolf Hall, taking the story up to Henry's success in annulling his marriage to Catherine of Aragon in order to marry Anne Boleyn, leaves the audience - both those who have and those who haven't read the novels - looking for more.

Poulton has coped with the ramifications of the power play in and around the Tudor court by scripting fast-moving and flexible scenes, welded together by Ben Miles's tour de force portrayal of Cromwell.

Virtually continuously on stage, Miles reveals the multiple strands of his personality.

At various junctures, he's the devoted and faithful follower of the master tactician Cardinal Wolsey, a determined survivor in the political and religious bear pit and a ruthless wheeler-dealer in the king's affairs, both domestically and internationally. At the same time Miles reveals a humorous and human vulnerability to the sense of loss that informs life.

Among the magnificently costumed cast, Paul Jesson's pragmatically avuncular Wolsey, who remains as an onstage guiding spirit to Cromwell even after his fall and death, Lydia Leonard's spitefully ambitious Anne Boleyn - a wife who one feels any king would be justified in beheading - and Nathaniel Parker's quicksilver, charismatic Henry, ageing and fattening through the progress of the history, acquire Shakespearean stature.

The dialogue obviously lacks the Bard's poetic power but Poulton has invested a credible modernity into the exchanges which may surprise but never jars.

The weight of political discourse is leavened in Wolf Hall by the interlude masque in which the downfall of Wolsey is depicted as devils forking him into Hell and in Bring Up The Bodies in Cromwell's spider-web trapping of those of his enemies who had revelled in his mentor's ruin into sharing the Queen's fate.

The essential tests of these dramatic adaptations is whether they live as theatre pieces independent of their fictional sources and, as historical drama, do they speak to our day rather than come across as mere costume extravaganzas.

On both counts they succeed, particularly in demonstrating that in the courts of power Wolsey and Cromwell know that "man is wolf to man."

Runs until March 29. Box office: (0844) 800-1114