Andy Drachenberg: What inspired you to write this story?
Hilary Mantel: The Tudors have been so worked over in novels, in plays… It’s a risky thing to do. But I became aware that there was a gap in the story we’re being told. Where’s Thomas Cromwell? He’s actually central to the most dramatic events of Henry’s reign. But in novels, in plays, he’s always offstage, he’s always lurking in a corner, he’s always in shadow. I thought, “what would happen if we put this man center stage? What happens if the familiar story falls into a completely new pattern?” And the story is made new. He is, for me, the most fascinating character in Henry’s court. It’s the trajectory, it’s the arc of his story – a blacksmith’s son to Earl of Essex. How do you do that? What kind of man does it take to achieve that? I was simply in pursuit of the answer to that question. At first I thought I was writing one book to cover his whole career. But when I began to work and uncover more material, the complexity of it struck home to me, and the whole project flowered out from the middle.
AD: How did you evaluate and decide what to hold onto and what could get let go for the story you wanted to tell?
HM: The thing about the story is that it comes from behind Cromwell’s eyes; it’s from his point of view. So, where Cromwell is, we the audience are. Once you’ve made that decision, it’s very obvious how your material selects itself. Does Cromwell know about this? Does Cromwell think about this? You’re keeping in mind your central figure.
AD: The scale of your involvement with this production is fascinating. Often when books are adapted into other works, the writer is not involved in the development of it, but I just watched you upstairs in the middle of a rehearsal scene. What does this production mean to you?
HM: My involvement with the production has grown quite gradually and organically. I certainly never expected to be drawn into it the way I have been, and it’s thanks to our adaptor, Mike Poulton, for letting me in on the writing process, and Jeremy Herrin, our director, for generously allowing me to participate in the rehearsal room, and the actors for welcoming me onto their team. There’s no pattern for this. Lots of books are adapted for the stage, but then they’re done, they’re finished, the book is closed. I am actively involved in writing the next part of Cromwell’s story, so for me it’s all a work-in-progress. This is a privilege for a writer of historical fiction, to be allowed to work in the theatre, with actors, where the action is live, because it reminds you of something very important. It reminds you that history is not predetermined. There were turning-points when it could have happened in a completely different way. When you watch live performers, then every show, it refutes you to the moment. You think “but what if you said something different? What if another thought had come to him? Would the course of history have been different?” And you see that it would. And every night, the shows are different. You watch particularly the big interactions between Anne Boleyn and Cromwell, Cromwell and the King, watch how they play off each other, how the mood is different each evening. It makes you think profoundly of where you situate yourself in the moment of history, how you observe it. For me, writing the third book is an inspiration, and I am no longer on my own with this project. We’ve become co-imaginers. It’s a wonderful thing, the commitment and the interest of the actors, the way they own their parts, they own their characters. So now they can turn around to me and say, “I would never do that,” and I would listen.
AD: Going down that path with the actors helping you keep things fresh and living and breathing, if you look back, how did you first begin to find these voices for each character, and where one’s perspective and tone came from?
HM: The only ways you can get the characters’ voices is to read and read and read everything you can get your hands on. What we have left behind, documentary evidence, a great deal of which is in the form of letters. Tudor letters are very stiff, very formal, they go according to a template, people hide their real feelings, and often the subject is quite dry. It is more likely to be legal and official than personal. However, often people didn’t write their own letters, they dictated them to a clerk, so whatever the subject matter, that is the person’s voice. You are hearing them speak, and that’s a valuable thing to remember. Of course, there are some characters of whom we have very little evidence and, well, that’s the writer’s trick, that’s the writer’s trade. I wish I could explain it and write a handbook, I’d be rich!
AD: The way people describe this as a political thriller is at odds with usual expectations about historical plays. Can you talk about the tone and the direction that we come to the story from?
HM: The story shouldn’t really be viewed as historical drama. That suggests something stiff, formal. Above all, something that’s over. This is not over. This is now. This is contemporary politics. It’s the politics of any era, it’s the universal human story, the struggle for power. It is then, but it’s also now. These are universal human types, and the questions that they’re raising—how one gets power, how one hangs onto power, what power does to you, how one survives in a harsh and hostile world, the negotiations between men and women, they are political, too—these are all questions that still make sense to us. So it is best viewed as a contemporary thriller. Don’t think of these people as wearing costumes; they’re not, they’re wearing clothes.
AD: What are you hopeful for the second people sit down in the theatre and the house lights go down? What are you hoping happens?
HM: Readers of the books have often said the magic is, “I think I’m really there. I think I’ve really passed into their world.” I hope that will happen for the theatre audiences, too, from the first moment when we’re whisked into this driven, high-energy, highly sexually-charged environment of Henry’s court, and we’re pulled straight into the center of it, no padding, no explanation, we’re just there, and able to engage, I think, directly with those people speaking directly to us. I think people will be surprised. There were a lot of pieties that this drama knocks away. There’s a lot of received opinion that it challenges. When you see these familiar people—Henry, Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn—you may come with a preconceived idea of what they were like. I hope we will challenge that. I hope we will entertain our audiences, but also allow them to take away something to think about, be perhaps a little less certain, be provoked, be amused—it’s a lot funnier than people ever imagine it’s going to be—and be frightened as well. Be drawn into it so that they feel the moment-by-moment fear of the people whose life hangs by a thread.
AD: With the transfer to Broadway, what’s the thing you’re most excited for?
HM: It’s a wonderful challenge to go back into rehearsal, get a fresh run of things, and know that you’re taking it to a completely new audience whose responses are not predictable, who will unsettle us, perhaps, and make us all think again very hard about what we’re doing, how we’re telling this story. I think it’s a challenge for the audience, it’s a challenge for us as well. I look forward to the freshness of it and simply taking our characters to the new world. That’s what it would be to them—to an unknown land.
Hilary Mantel (Novelist) is a novelist, dramatist and critic. She writes both contemporary and historical fiction, and her best-known works are her novels about the Tudor statesman Thomas Cromwell. Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies both won the Man Booker prize. She is now working on the concluding volume of the trilogy, The Mirror & The Light. Her most recent book is a short story collection: The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, 2104. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Governor of The Royal Shakespeare Company. She lives in Devon, England.