This interpretation of Jane Seymour (Olivia Marcus) sees her as something of a silly little girl compared to her formidable predecessors, but she does have enough nous to use her influence to heal a royal rift, and asks Henry to reconnect with his disinherited eldest daughter.
But Mary (Melissa Allan) will never agree to her father's demand that she acknowledge him as head of the church, and it's left to Cromwell to find a compromise, which he does by the counter-intuitive move of getting the Holy Roman Emperor's Ambassador (Matthew Pidgeon) to act as an intermediary. On Jane's death the search for wife #4 begins, and while Cromwell's suggestion is a disaster, it isn't shown to be as major a factor in his downfall as it's often seen. The story toys with a number of the theories as to why Henry rejected Anna of Cleves (Rosanna Adams,) but mainly falls on the side of the argument that his ill-advised "romantic" first meeting in disguise left them both with a bad first impression they never shook off.
The first act gets muddled up in a lot of plotlines like a misunderstanding when Cromwell tries to marry off his son (Terique Jarrett) to Jane Seymour's sister (Aurora Dawson-Hunte,) or when he misguidedly tries to make some kind of penance to the late Cardinal Wolsey by proposing to his daughter (Umi Myers) himself. The ghost of his former mentor (Tony Turner) also continues to haunt Cromwell throughout the play, which finds more focus in the second act as we get to his downfall. It's made pretty clear this has little to do with Anna of Cleves, and all to do with the machinations of the nobles. Led by Nicholas Woodeson's Duke of Norfolk, who's happy to let any number of his nieces get married and beheaded by Henry as long as it keeps him in power, they can't wait to take down Cromwell and the threat he poses to their hereditary rights.
Where Bring Up the Bodies did start to suggest a bit more of a dark side to Cromwell, The Mirror and the Light largely goes back to almost a hagiography, the only sign of corruption being when Cromwell helps himself to the spoils from the dissolved monasteries as enthusiastically as the nobles do. But with the original creative team of director Jeremy Herrin and designer Christopher Oram back at the helm this remains a slick production with quite a lot of humour - much of it coming from Cromwell's French servant Christophe (Paul Adeyefa) and the pompously entitled Richard Riche (Leo Wan.) Perhaps understandably given the events, the women in the story are largely there as plot devices, although there's an attempt to give Cromwell a slightly more fleshed-out female confidante in Lady Rochford (Jo Herbert.) Overall I didn't find this final chapter quite as successful as the first two in terms of creating a compelling, standalone story, but the time does fly by surprisingly quickly and entertainingly for a story of political infighting and beheading. And we do finally find out what the climbing frames hanging over the stage are all about. Well, sort of.
The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel and Ben Miles, based on the novel by Hilary Mantel, is booking until the 23rd of January at the Gielgud Theatre.
Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including interval.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.
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