If a producer came up with the idea of reviving Robert Bolt’s heavyweight 1960 play A Man for All Seasons on the basis of the popularity of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, he or she would have been proudly vindicated by a packed house for a weekday matinée at Malvern.
And for an appreciative audience, it was a joy too to see again this great play that combines the tension of a courtroom drama and the intellectual jousting of a Tom Stoppard with the added pleasure of meticulous Tudor designs.
Martin Shaw is outstanding in the title role, that of Sir Thomas More, principled and clever, or a man with "a horrible moral squint" and stubborn to the point of putting his own head on the block and potentially those of his family.
The crux of the play is that More, unwilling to take an oath acknowledging Henry VIII and not the Pope as the supreme head of the church, maintains a silence that, as a man of the law, he falsely believes cannot be used against him. Shaw wraps himself in secrecy as tightly as a package, his inner self hidden, yet trapped inside the confines of his own arguments.
Is this conscience or self-righteousness, noble self-sacrifice or conceit, loyalty to one’s own beliefs or the interests of the state? Given the span of years between the writing of the play and Mantel’s own masterpiece, it now seems like the closing argument of the defence after hearing the prosecution case.
It must, however, be judged ultimately as a work for the stage, and a brilliant one, not as a documentary. For an historical judgement, I’ll leave it to the academics.
Edward Bennett plays the pragmatic Thomas Cromwell, ruthless in his pursuit of the King’s interests, and his own, and not averse to putting the hand of Calum Finlay’s shifty Richard Rich to the flame, yet refusing point blank to the latter’s suggestion of putting More to the rack—something that, as Mantel pointed out, the saintly More was not averse to inflict on his enemies.
The real villain, of course, is Orlando James’s Henry, vain, bombastic, with a gadfly mind that brooks no opposition. Asif Khan plays Spanish ambassador Chapuys with an insinuating political realism, Timothy Watson a less than boorish Norfolk, while Abigail Cruttenden and Annie Kingsnorth as More’s wife and daughter are effective as the only women in the piece, giving a more intimate perspective on the consequences of Thomas’s obduracy.
What is one to conclude, politically, morally, theologically? The verdict probably belongs to Gary Wilmot, ‘The Common Man’ and one of many parts, steward, boatman and ultimately chairman of the jury obediently to condemn More, who provides amusing links between each stage of the action. He doesn’t much care, as long as it pays well.
The production continues a UK to to Cheltenham, Oxford, Guildford, Canterbury and Richmond until 15 March 2025.