“Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light” picks up where “Wolf Hall” left off, amid the gruesome beheading of Anne Boleyn in 1536, which we get to see this time in even more gruesome detail.
In real life, however, there has been an unusually long gap between series and sequel. It has been 10 years since the release of “Wolf Hall,” based on the first two novels in Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell series. This means that in “The Mirror and the Light,” based on the final novel, the actor Mark Rylance is a decade older than the 50-something character he is playing.
And it works, because the Cromwell in the new six-episode series (beginning Sunday on PBS’s “Masterpiece”) is haunted and beaten down by his work as Henry VIII’s political and matrimonial fixer, a job that included fabricating the evidence that led to Boleyn’s murder. In that first scene both we and Cromwell are reliving the beheading (necessary, from Henry’s point of view, because Anne, his second wife, had not borne a son).
“The Mirror and the Light” is very much of a piece with the earlier “Wolf Hall,” written and directed by the same men — Peter Straughan and Peter Kosminsky — and with many actors returning to their roles, including Rylance and, as Henry, Damian Lewis. Among relatively recent historical costume dramas, the shows set a standard for polish and seriousness.
But as the story of the commoner Cromwell’s decline and abrupt fall, “The Mirror and the Light” has an entirely different feel than the up-by-the-boot-straps, grimly celebratory “Wolf Hall.” The mood is nervous and ominous, as Cromwell begins to make errors and give in to his emotions. And it habitually casts its eye back in time, as Cromwell reassesses the often dirty work he has done. Picking up on a device from the novel, “The Mirror and the Light” continually drops in snippets of Cromwell’s guilty memories in the form of bits of film we have already seen across the two series.
His guilt even has a supporting role in the form of the dead Cardinal Wolsey, the beloved master and mentor whose downfall Cromwell was unable to prevent. Cromwell now has late-night conversations with Wolsey’s slightly diaphanous ghost, scenes that are a little cringey but that do us the favor of keeping Jonathan Pryce and his archly disapproving eyebrows in the show.
As worthy as “The Mirror and the Light” is, the uncomfortable truth is that this retrospective, rueful gaze — the first and last shots of Rylance are of Cromwell looking backward — gets a little tedious across six episodes. It doesn’t help that the events covered, including Henry’s third through fifth marriages, do not have the juicy, morbid force that the deaths of Boleyn and Thomas More gave the first series.
One thing Straughan does to compensate is to chart Cromwell’s moods through his interactions with a series of women: Boleyn’s successor as queen, Jane Seymour (Kate Phillips), who dies needlessly after childbirth; Wolsey’s daughter, Dorothea (Hannah Khalique-Brown), who blames Cromwell for her father’s death; Henry’s daughter Mary (an excellent Lilit Lesser), who becomes a pawn in the machinations of Cromwell’s enemies.
These plot elements, given equal play with the court politics and battles over religion that actually determined Cromwell’s fate, are a way to soften the character — to suggest a compassion and rectitude under the brutal realpolitik (traits that the historical record does not necessarily support). They also supply a melodramatic, emotional charge — especially in Rylance’s scenes with Lesser — that the entirely male scenes around council tables and in whispered meetings lack.
As Cromwell’s enemies marshal against him, Straughan and Kosminsky have trouble animating the court intrigue in any very interesting way — it plays as a shouty, monotonous version of fraternity life in which hazing results in beheading, if you’re lucky, or having your intestines pulled out of your body, if you’re not. The fine actors Timothy Spall and Alex Jennings, as Cromwell’s two main antagonists, are not able to overcome the generic nature of these scenes.
“The Mirror and the Light” kicks into another gear, however, whenever Lewis is onscreen as the narcissistic yet knowing and perceptive Henry. Lewis’s contained, preternaturally magnetic performance is as sure an embodiment as you could imagine of the force of a powerful monarch.
It has an effect on the show that is both historically authentic and dramatically problematic: When Lewis is offscreen, we, like Cromwell and the other courtiers, are anxiously waiting to see what he will do next. The prodigious Rylance is fine, but Cromwell’s role in “The Mirror and the Light” involves a preponderance of rueful staring into space. Henry may be the secondary character, but as the title says, he’s the show’s light.