Thomas Cromwell is back, and this time he’s a romantic. In Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, the latest BBC TV adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Tudor novels, we see Henry VIII’s chief facilitator turn 21st-century empath, offering a listening ear to half the young women of the Henrician court.
Mark Rylance, former artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, is an actor with an extraordinary capacity for vulnerability. Here he is at his best and most sympathetic. As Cromwell, we watch him safeguard the victimised adolescent Mary Tudor, coaching her to negotiate her way out of looming execution at the hands of her axe-happy father, Henry. (Cromwell made a promise to Mary’s dying mother, you see, and he’s a sweetie like that.)
