These plays hardly need more praise from the likes of me, but they’re going to get it anyway. I enjoyed them as books, although it took me a while to get into Hilary Mantel’s world. Once there, however, it was with a slight rush of blood to the head that I returned to modernity, as her descriptions are so vivid that you can feel that you are reading an illicit New Testament by candlelight, rather than a Booker prize-winning modern novel on a kindle.

The plays are a miracle of compression, with actors turning on a dime to change scenes and whole chapters in the book(s) being conveyed in tableaux. You do miss Mantel’s description, at least at first, but the plays bring new insights into these oh-so-familiar characters and are uniformly beautifully acted. As the dialogue is perfectly modern (yet era-appropriate), there is not that period of transition that I always experience at the beginning of a Shakespeare play, where I feel that I have to settle in to the poetry before I can really get the hang of what is going on (it’s like watching a play in a foreign language that I speak tolerably, but not perfectly). None of that here.

I saw Wolf Hall at Stratford in the spring, and the intimacy there was a real joy. The deep thrust stage at the Swan made these transitions beautiful to watch, which I felt was, to a certain extent, lost at the Aldwych with its traditional proscenium arch. If I recall correctly, the initial reviews generally felt that BUtB was the better of the two plays, but having experienced that at the Aldwych and Wolf Hall at the Swan, my opinion is the reverse.

Nathaniel Parker brings swagger, vulnerability and deep (if self-serving) religious faith to Henry VIII, and Lydia Leonard is a monstrous Anne Boleyn for whom somehow we feel sympathy. The minimal presence of Paul Jesson as Cardinal Wolsey in BUtB may well have been the reason that I preferred Wolf Hall, as his avuncular, ruthless presence was sorely missed, the ghost not being enough of him for my taste.

But the plays belong to Ben Miles as Cromwell. He lets you see the cleverness, but never all of it. He shows just enough of the hidden violence for you to believe in it wholeheartedly, but not so much that it is over the top. It is a stunning performance, and all the more so for being a subtle one.  It is tempting to buy into Mantel’s and Miles’s interpretations of Cromwell, but I must confess that my mind keeps wandering back to the Holbein portrait, where I feel that the cunning (and, dare I say, evil) is much less well concealed: 

I thoroughly enjoyed Joshua James’s performance, but it is for another reason that I conclude with Rafe Sadler. As a devotee of historic houses, I thought I had seen everything interesting within the M25, but I only recently discovered Sutton House. Located, somewhat incongruously, in the middle of Hackney, Sutton House was Rafe Sadler’s country house. A miraculous Tudor survival, preserved by the National Trust, it has long been ignored and is well worth a visit.