Wolf Hall

[Guinevere]

Anyone watching? It's a BBC Two production of Hilary Mantel's two novels about Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII, Cardinal Wolsey, Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn and the Howard clan, moving on to the Seymours, and their influence. Great great books, and the series (which is finally being shown on Masterpiece - apparently Auntie Beeb likes to punish us colonials) is wonderful.

You can sample all 500 channels on your TV this weekend, and you won’t find a better acting performance than the one Mark Rylance delivers in “Wolf Hall.”

Episode three of the six-part series airs Sunday at 10 p.m. on PBS, and while it has a uniformly strong cast that includes Damian Lewis as Henry VIII and Claire Foy as Anne Boleyn, Rylance rules this world.

He plays Thomas Cromwell, who’s more or less Henry’s chief of staff. He’s a dealmaker, a fixer, all that.

It’s a precarious position. If the deals don’t get done or the fix doesn’t get made, the capricious Henry may not stop at simply blaming the messenger. He may behead the messenger, as he beheads wives for whom he no longer has any use.

“Wolf Hall,” a condensation of the best-selling Hilary Mantel novels “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies,” has all the trappings of classic PBS.

It’s beautifully filmed, with a measured pace and a priority on the performances. That showcases Lewis, in a very different role than his Nicholas Brody on “Homeland,” but it mostly keeps the spotlight on Rylance, a well-known British stage actor who’s less known here but shouldn’t be.

He plays Cromwell with a face that would win a stonewalling contest against the Sphinx.

It’s a brilliant tactic for navigating palace politics and works out equally well for the viewer, because Rylance instead communicates with gestures, tiny movements, a turn of the head.

It’s not that he never speaks. He’s clever, he’s smart, he’s funny, he’s occasionally ribald, and he doesn’t always get it right.

He makes Cromwell, an often-forgotten figure in history, into a TV character it will be almost impossible not to remember.

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainmen ... -1.2186735

[MajGenl.Meade]

Mrs Meade is watching and reports "uh....."

She's big on The Six Wives of Henry VIII, I ClaVdiVs and such historical dramas but thinks this one is a little flat and sometimes overdramatized. Sounds a bit contradictory but I think she means it's a bit dull with sudden sillies. But she's watching it anyway.

[Big RR]

Meade and Guin--if you like these sort of dramas (and I'll definitely seek this one out), you might want to seek out the Showtime series The Tudors, which ran 4 seasons (I think) and covered the reign of Henry VIII. The first season was the best and centered entirely on his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, his split with the church, and other events occurring during that time. It's not entirely historically accurate, but not terrible, and I got some new insights; like on Thomas More, the principled man profiled in A Man for All Season who championed his right to his freedom of religion, but participated (as chancellor) in the planning slaughter of protestants trying to claim the same rights (which apparently is accurate). I particularly liked Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Henry, who was aged during the show to go from the strapping athletic man, to the portly king we know from many portraits, to the syphilitic old man and played all parts well.

It's worth a check.

[Guinevere]

Oh BiggRR, I *loved* the Tudors and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers. I think I even own a couple of the seasons.

Wolf Hall is not the Tudors. It's not nearly as overtly sexy, is far more historically accurate, and is a lot more subtle (I think some would call it dry, even). The show (and the books) are about Cromwell, and Mark Rylance is just wonderful.

[Scooter]

I am enjoying it. It is a much more multi-faceted, nuanced portrayal of Cromwell than seen in traditional fare (A Man for All Seasons, Anne of the Thousand Days, even The Tudors). I also enjoyed seeing the darker side of Thomas More, as opposed to the typical hagiography of the man.

[Guinevere]

Yes! I'm not a fan of More so I loved how she wrote him in the books and the adaption is handling that very well.

[Big RR]

You're both making it sound definitely worth checking out. "Dry" can often make for an interesting drama. I'll keep an eye out.

[Lord Jim]

You guys are definitely making this sound worth checking out...

I wasn't a big fan of The Tudors (a little too soap operaish for me) but I do remember the original Six Wives Of Henry The VIII...

If I recall it was the first Masterpiece Theater presentation on PBS, back in the 70s...

[Big RR]

Jim--I'm not certain whether it was ever on Masterpiece Theater, but I recall watching The Six Wives of Henry VIII in late 60s/early 70s on a local independent station. I think it was a BBC production.

ETA: Now that I think of it, it might have been aired on a network, not an independent station--I'm just not sure. But I do not recall it on PBS.

Also, I do think it was introduced each week by a British narrator (not Alastair Cooke; perhaps Anthony Quayle or Sebastian Cabot), but the set of the show I bought years ago does not have this narration, so I think was added for the US audience.

[Lord Jim]

Big RR, it looks like we're both right:

The Six Wives of Henry VIII is a series of six television plays produced by the BBC and first transmitted between 1 January and 5 February 1970. The series was later aired in the United States on CBS from 1 August to 5 September 1971 with narration added by Anthony Quayle.[1] The series was rebroadcast in the United States without commercials on PBS as part of its Masterpiece Theatre series.

Each of the six plays focuses on a single wife, often from their perspective and was written by a different dramatist. The series was produced by Mark Shivas and Ronald Travers and directed by Naomi Capon and John Glenister.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Six_Wi ... _series%29

It was broadcast in the first season of Masterpiece Theater, but I can't verify that it was the very first one:

Season 1: 1971-1972
The First Churchills
The Spoils of Poynton
The Possessed
Pere Goriot
Jude the Obscure
The Gambler
Resurrection
Cold Comfort Farm
The Six Wives of Henry VIII
Elizabeth R
The Last of the Mohicans

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/arc ... grams.html

[Scooter]

I look at that entire Masterpiece archive and suddenly realize how much of my DVD collection comes from it. Including Six Wives and Elizabeth R (Glenda Jackson is to Queen Bess as Julie Andrews is to Maria von Trapp - once you've seen her in the role, any other performance suffers by comparison).

[Big RR]

That first season looks superb; I know I've seen many of them.

Thanks Jim.

Scooter thy did do a lot of great shows.

Speaking of PBS, I read somewhere that the entire Shakespeare canon they broadcast around the same time will soon be avaialable on DVD. There were a lot of great productions there as well.

ETA: I checked with amazon and the entire collection (37 DVDS) is available for $1200; I'll bet that price drops in the future.

[Gob]

I'll say nothing....

The codpieces used in the hit BBC drama Wolf Hall were too small and should have been double the size, according to an expert.

This is one of a number of inaccuracy spotted in the big budget adaptation of Hilary Mantel's books and was said to have been done so as not to offend and baffle the shows American audience.

Victoria Miller, who has researched the codpiece for her PHD, said those used in the show would have been far too modest for Henry VIII's court.

'They're way too small to be accurate – they should be at least double the size,' said the Cambridge academic, according to the Guardian.

'You can kind of see them there, but they aren't really stuffed, and are easily missed – they've really toned them down for a mainstream audience.

'The codpiece was meant to draw the eye to the general region.'

Mark Rylance, who played Thomas Cromwell, blamed their diminutive size on a 'directive from our American producers'.

'I wasn't personally disappointed by the codpieces: I'm a little more used to them than other people from being at the Globe for ten years,' Rylance said, according to the Daily Telegraph.

'But I can see for modern audiences, perhaps more in America, they may not know exactly what's going on down there.'

[wesw]

so, in medieval England did they call their penises cods? I guess without regular showers it could get a little fishy down there

[Gob]

Common Germanic, cf. Old Norse koddi "pillow," Dutch kodde "bag".

[wesw]

thank you

[Scooter]

This is broadcasting again on PBS beginning tonight for anyone who missed it the first time around.

[kristina]

Thanks for the heads up, Scooter. I watched some of it the first time around, but not enough to keep track of everything that was going on. Maybe I'll give it another try.

[Scooter]

The second series, Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light, has begun broadcasting on PBS Masterpiece Theater Sunday nights. So far it seems to have held up the quality of the original.