Wolf Hall: Parts One & Two Theater review

Despite its title, there are more species than just Canis lupus scurrying and lurking along the margins of “Wolf Hall: Parts One & Two,” the Royal Shakespeare Company’s triumphant, blockbuster adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Tudor-history novels. It’s a regular illuminated manuscript up there: quivering rabbits standing in for doomed courtiers; clucking hens supplied by gossipy ladies-in-waiting; and warthogs and goats in the form of odious, snobby lords. So many beasts, and only one man their zookeeper: Thomas Cromwell. As cunningly played by Ben Miles (last here as a tongue-tied veterinarian in “The Norman Conquests”), Cromwell is at once cipher, savior and demon over nearly six hours of wrangling between pope and crown, and then within the vipers’ nest that was the court of King Henry VIII (Nathaniel Parker). As reviewers of the novels noted, Hilary Mantel took a figure most historians regard as a cold-blooded architect of the modern totalitarian state—a Machiavel who engineered the downfalls of Sir Thomas More and Anne Boleyn—and imbued him with humane motivations and sympathetic depth. It’s a bit like revealing what an enlightened mensch Senator Joe McCarthy really was.