More theatre and a tv episode
Aug. 18th, 2025 09:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakMore plays:
Harold Pinter Theatre: A Man for All Seasons
By Robert Bolt, who at least in terms of this particular play is to Hilary Mantell what C.S. Lewis is to Philipp Pullmann, i.e. Wolf Hall and sequels are the His Dark Materials to A Man for All Seasons’ Narnia, and as in the Pullmann-Lewis case, Mantell ended up doing exactly the same thing they begrudged in the end, just from the opposite direction.
Anyway: yours truly many a decade ago was introduced to Robert Bolt not through a stage play but via his screenplay for one of my favourite movies of all time, Lawrence of Arabia. I also did see the movie adaptation for A Man For All Seasons (starring Paul Scofield) years later, but wasn’t captivated nearly as much. This said, I did hear despite Bolt himself having done the adapting, there were some considerable differences to the stage play, and since I never had seen the later and it was on this week, I did watch it, directed by Jonathan Church and starring Martin Shaw in the leading role as Sir Thomas More, Gary Wilmot as The Common Man (aka the Brechtian fourth wall breaker who doesn’t exist in the movie but on stage as the second most text to say), Edward Bennett as Thomas Cromwell and Calum Finlay as Richard Rich. It was a straightforwardly historical production with everyone in Tudor costume (and great they looked in them, too), with even minor characters like Sam Parks as Archbishop Thomas Cramner made up to look as much as the portraits as possible. The Common Man as the play’s narrator who comments, talks to the audience and slips in and out of the bit parts (be they More’s steward or his executioner) felt all the more unusual and in retrospect definitely as what was missing from the film version. I mean, I know and understand the reason for the change - the Common Man is a very theatrical device, it would have had to be something from the movies for a movie, and I don’t know whether a early 1960s film going audience would have been ready for, hm, non-linear storytelling a la Tarantino or an off screen voice constantly interfering?
Either way, the reason why I still think there would have been something in th emovie is that The Common Man prevents the play from feeling staid or Worthy and too Hagiographic and is in his non stop sarcasm often, though not always, the comic relief in between increasingly dark goings on. And especially in the first part of the play, where I found Shaw’s performance as More too one note (the note being doom aware worry - More jests and is sarcastic himself in the text, but Shaw plays him constantly brooding already), that’s needed. Having critisized Shaw’s performance, I need to add that he’s very good in the second part of the play, not just in the More on trial scenes where he gets to spar with Cromwell but also in the ones with his family which must be really challenging for an actor, because as his wife and daughter urge him to compromise and live, More needs to be in agony in his awareness of what he’s doing to them but still determined not to budge and all this while coming across as loving and not suicidally fanatic, and Shaw really brings that across.
Something else the movie excised is an entire subplot concerning Eustace Chapuys, the Imperial Ambassador, and here I’m completely on board with Bolt having cut it out. The historical Chapuys was both interesting and in his reports to Charles V an invaluable resource to historians for events at Henry VIII’s court. Bolt’s version is for some reason called “Signor Chapuys” in the cast while the Common Man introduces him as “The Spanish Ambassador, who for some reason is French”. (Historical nitpicky sidenote alert: Actually, he was what today we’d call Belgian, meaning he hailed from the same part of Charles V.’s many realms that Charles himself grew up in, and yes, that means French was their mutual first language. And he wasn’t the Spanish Ambassador, he was the Imperial Ambassador. Yes, among many other things Charles was also the King of Spain - in fact, the first monarch to be so, having inherited Aragon from his maternal grandfather and Castile from his mother and grandmother -, but him being Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire was the top rank he held, and nobody at the time would have referred to him as “the King of Spain”, it would have been as if someone would have called Henry VIII not the King of England but the Duke of York; they’d have called him the Emperor.) The reason why I object to the Chapuys subplot is that Bolt gets some cheap laughs at the foreigner with the funny accent here, and otherwise uses the character to make it clear that More is A Good English Patriot because Chapuys makes constant overtures to enlist him on the side of Team Katherine and Spain so More can make various withering statements to enlighten the audience he might refuse to give Henry the approval of his tactics and the acknowledgment of the Royal Supremacy in church matters Henry wants, but he’s doing it for his conscience, not for some evil continental power. For my money, that’s a concession to British xenophobia too many.
(Mind you, there is one good theatrical pay off for the Chapuys subplot; where early in the play various characters proudly declare “this is England, not Spain”, they mean no Spanish Inquisition - the one thing an English audience is guaranteed to associate with Spain in the Tudor era - , and in the last but one scene of the play when Thomas Cromwell, having just invented thought crime, says “this is England, not Spain”, More bitterly laughs because obviously the entire trial illustrates Henrician England has become the embodiment of what the earlier speakers associated Spain with.)
While we’re at historical sidenotes: What I meant earlier re: the Lewis/Pullman comparison is that Wolf Hall (and to lesser degree its two sequels) feel in many ways as wanting to deconstruct the image of both More and Cromwell that A Man for all Seasons didn’t create but certainly popularized for a 20th century audience, and that both works use exactly the same tactics on their protagonist and antagonist characterisation. A Man for All Seasons and Wolf Hall edit out anything a contemporary to the writer audience might not like or even feel repelled by in their respective protagonists (so, among other things, there’s absolutely no mention of the six people executed for heresy during More’s short tenure as Lord Chancellor in A Man for All Seasons, and no mention of Cromwell introducing the bill making male homosexuality a death penalty offense in Wolf Hall and sequels) in order to make their main character the perfect Renaissance guy. While conversely making their antagonist the embodiment of what their contemporary loathes, and editing out their virtues. So Mantel’s More is a religious fanatic with hinted sadism bubbling under the sexually repressed surface while Bolt’s Cromwell is an ambitious state bureaucrat demanding the individual’s complete subjection to whatever the state wants them to believe, who would have reminded the 1960s audience of both Stalinism and MacCarthyism; by contrast, Bolt’s Cromwell isn’t anymore loyal to Wolsey than Mantel’s More is self-deprecating or a tender father to all his children. And so forth.
All this I knew going on based on my admittedly a bit vague memories from the movie version of “A Man for All seasons”, so what caught me by surprise is that the play a) makes more of More’s Catholicism in terms of what he believes in than the movie as opposed to presenting him as an anachronistically 1960s fighter for the freedom of conscience and b) while having Cromwell firmly as the antagonist, makes it clear he doesn’t actually want More dead, he’s arranging for the prison and trial in order to make More publicly submit to Henry’s authority and expects this to be the eventual outcome till shortly before More’s death, and he does so because of More’s Europe wide reputation and the symbolism, not because he has some personal grudge against More. There’s also the difference in acting: Edward Bennett (another Bridgerton alumnus) delivers a very subtle performance as Cromwell, never shouting or muhahaing, but being affable and cool in turn, delivering the occasional cutting one liner with sharp precision. The Cromwell/More sparring scenes certainly were highlights of the production precisely because a lot of emphasis was being put on the both of them being brilliant lawyers, and equal to each other in this regard in the way the other characters aren’t.
Certainly not Henry VIII, who in his one scene comes across as a vainglorious narcissistic toddler who has to be constantly adored and mollified by the people around him but has the charisma and hail-fellow-well-met populist manner to be genuinely popular with a wider public at the same time. No prices for guessing current day associations by not just this particular viewer.
Another core scene with very contemporary associations is More’s argument with his son-in-law William Roper (Sam Philipps). Roper in Bolt’s play starts out as a Lutheran; this is when the play actually hints at More having a set of beliefs a current day audience might not be on board with, when he calls Luther and Roper, at this point not yet engaged to More’s daughter Margaret, both heretics, but then immediately after Roper’s indignant exit tones it down by letting More observe Roper is the type of young person who always jumps on fashionable rebel movements, and he’ll go off Luther the moment the majority becomes pro Luther. Roper then proves him right; the next time we see him he’s still convinced the church needs reforming but has cooled on Luther, and by the time the play ends, when Roman Catholics are becoming a persecuted minority in England, he’s become a hardcore Catholic. The argument scene I’m referring to happens mid play, when More is Lord Chancellor but Cromwell is clearly preparing to gun for him, and Roper asks More why as long as he has still power he doesn’t use that to go after his enemies. More points out there are laws:
William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
You could have heard a pin drop. BTW, More isn’t the only lawyer aware of the danger of precedent in this play; in the second half when talking to Richard Rich Cromwell surprises him by stating he wants More submissive, not dead, because if he creates More’s death, he has a sense that his own days might be numbered one day. (And Bennett plays that line with complete sincerity.) Anyway, to me, this is why this play is still worth staging for more than people interested in Tudor history. Along with the play’s point that its version of More thinks being silent and not voicing his opinion out loud will keep him safe only to realise that in an absolute state silence and neutrality is no longer an option because the paranoid authoritarian state sees even silence as critique and will never be content with less than active collaboration, and with people changing their convictions to whatever the head of state wants them to be.
There are only two female roles, Margaret Roper (More’s oldest daughter and the only one to make it into this play) and Alice More (More’s second wife), and Margaret, amazing female scholar or not, is so relentlessly cheerful and adoring that Alice, played by Abigail Cruttenden, is definitely the better part and comes across as more interesting. She argues with More most of the time without the play implying she’s wrong for doing so, and the scene where, wanting to distract her from trying to convince him to submit and save his life, he compliments her for her cooking, and she says sadly and quietly: “Do you truly think so little of me?” (To assume that she’d be distracted from the main point, and that this is all he can think of to talk to her in this situation) is devastating, with either play or production or both allowing their saintly hero to be in the wrong (and realising it in his reaction when she says this).
Lastly: young Richard Rich (a name one has always to assure people is not invented but real) as a budding snake here is interesting to return to after having read the Shardlake novels (where he becomes the hero’s main antagonist), which were not yet written when I saw the movie version, so the movie was how I got introduced to one of the Tudor era’s biggest and most successful opportunists. As the Common Man in the play points out, while all the Thomases (More, Cromwell, Cramner) get executed or nearly so (Norfolk), Rich in every twist and turn, no matter who is on top, Protestants or Catholics, goes with the current regime, often via betraying his previous set, profits and ends up dying in old age and rich in his bed, having risen as far as Lord Chancellor.
Foundation 3.06: In which the moon isn’t the only thing eclipsed.
The Demerzel and Gaal confrontation was everything I’d hoped for, including Demerzel’s fury at Dawn’s seeming demise (I say seeming because we do have precedent of nanites stopping to work without the Cleon in question being dead) and Gaal convincing her to let her make her case despite near strangulation. (Complete with the news that Demerzel provided original Hari with the data of her millennia of life which allowed him to develop psychohistory to begin with, which I think is from the prequel novels but really works here.) (It also explains where Hari got the money and tech to develop something like the Prime Radiant and the Vault from.) That scene was epic, and is a testimony of how well both characters have been developed through three seasons.
Meanwhile, Brother Day and the audience discover when he has tracked down Song that she did indeed lose her memories (as claimed by Demerzel) of her time with Cleon but has no desire to get them back; what’s more, she’s living already with a life partner, Emma of Normandy from Vikings: Valhalla (I had liked the character and actress there and am glad she got a part in another show I like) and even when Day tries to interest her by pointing out she saw a robot while with him, it only gets him stunned, literally, and captured. Sucks to be Day, I guess, not for the first time. It does leave Dusk and his black hole weapon as the sole Cleon still at large, and given that Demerzel has been able to help Gaal refine her vision and realised Trantor is about to be engulfed in a Black Hole as a consequence of the Mule fight, I very much fear I know where this is going.
Speaking of the Mule: of course Vault!Hari has no idea of his existence. The only reason Hari Prime knew was because of Gaal’s vision, and the Mule as a spontanously occuring Mutant was not something that could be accounted for in calculations. As Vault!Hari was always the smuggest version of the character, it was not a little satisfying to see his stunned expression in the big climax of the episode. Mind you, the way Magnifico acted in this episode rather feeds into my assumption the show will go with a certain element of the books, which again stops me from speculating freely, but if it does there will be more stunned faces all around.
Harold Pinter Theatre: A Man for All Seasons
By Robert Bolt, who at least in terms of this particular play is to Hilary Mantell what C.S. Lewis is to Philipp Pullmann, i.e. Wolf Hall and sequels are the His Dark Materials to A Man for All Seasons’ Narnia, and as in the Pullmann-Lewis case, Mantell ended up doing exactly the same thing they begrudged in the end, just from the opposite direction.
Anyway: yours truly many a decade ago was introduced to Robert Bolt not through a stage play but via his screenplay for one of my favourite movies of all time, Lawrence of Arabia. I also did see the movie adaptation for A Man For All Seasons (starring Paul Scofield) years later, but wasn’t captivated nearly as much. This said, I did hear despite Bolt himself having done the adapting, there were some considerable differences to the stage play, and since I never had seen the later and it was on this week, I did watch it, directed by Jonathan Church and starring Martin Shaw in the leading role as Sir Thomas More, Gary Wilmot as The Common Man (aka the Brechtian fourth wall breaker who doesn’t exist in the movie but on stage as the second most text to say), Edward Bennett as Thomas Cromwell and Calum Finlay as Richard Rich. It was a straightforwardly historical production with everyone in Tudor costume (and great they looked in them, too), with even minor characters like Sam Parks as Archbishop Thomas Cramner made up to look as much as the portraits as possible. The Common Man as the play’s narrator who comments, talks to the audience and slips in and out of the bit parts (be they More’s steward or his executioner) felt all the more unusual and in retrospect definitely as what was missing from the film version. I mean, I know and understand the reason for the change - the Common Man is a very theatrical device, it would have had to be something from the movies for a movie, and I don’t know whether a early 1960s film going audience would have been ready for, hm, non-linear storytelling a la Tarantino or an off screen voice constantly interfering?
Either way, the reason why I still think there would have been something in th emovie is that The Common Man prevents the play from feeling staid or Worthy and too Hagiographic and is in his non stop sarcasm often, though not always, the comic relief in between increasingly dark goings on. And especially in the first part of the play, where I found Shaw’s performance as More too one note (the note being doom aware worry - More jests and is sarcastic himself in the text, but Shaw plays him constantly brooding already), that’s needed. Having critisized Shaw’s performance, I need to add that he’s very good in the second part of the play, not just in the More on trial scenes where he gets to spar with Cromwell but also in the ones with his family which must be really challenging for an actor, because as his wife and daughter urge him to compromise and live, More needs to be in agony in his awareness of what he’s doing to them but still determined not to budge and all this while coming across as loving and not suicidally fanatic, and Shaw really brings that across.
Something else the movie excised is an entire subplot concerning Eustace Chapuys, the Imperial Ambassador, and here I’m completely on board with Bolt having cut it out. The historical Chapuys was both interesting and in his reports to Charles V an invaluable resource to historians for events at Henry VIII’s court. Bolt’s version is for some reason called “Signor Chapuys” in the cast while the Common Man introduces him as “The Spanish Ambassador, who for some reason is French”. (Historical nitpicky sidenote alert: Actually, he was what today we’d call Belgian, meaning he hailed from the same part of Charles V.’s many realms that Charles himself grew up in, and yes, that means French was their mutual first language. And he wasn’t the Spanish Ambassador, he was the Imperial Ambassador. Yes, among many other things Charles was also the King of Spain - in fact, the first monarch to be so, having inherited Aragon from his maternal grandfather and Castile from his mother and grandmother -, but him being Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire was the top rank he held, and nobody at the time would have referred to him as “the King of Spain”, it would have been as if someone would have called Henry VIII not the King of England but the Duke of York; they’d have called him the Emperor.) The reason why I object to the Chapuys subplot is that Bolt gets some cheap laughs at the foreigner with the funny accent here, and otherwise uses the character to make it clear that More is A Good English Patriot because Chapuys makes constant overtures to enlist him on the side of Team Katherine and Spain so More can make various withering statements to enlighten the audience he might refuse to give Henry the approval of his tactics and the acknowledgment of the Royal Supremacy in church matters Henry wants, but he’s doing it for his conscience, not for some evil continental power. For my money, that’s a concession to British xenophobia too many.
(Mind you, there is one good theatrical pay off for the Chapuys subplot; where early in the play various characters proudly declare “this is England, not Spain”, they mean no Spanish Inquisition - the one thing an English audience is guaranteed to associate with Spain in the Tudor era - , and in the last but one scene of the play when Thomas Cromwell, having just invented thought crime, says “this is England, not Spain”, More bitterly laughs because obviously the entire trial illustrates Henrician England has become the embodiment of what the earlier speakers associated Spain with.)
While we’re at historical sidenotes: What I meant earlier re: the Lewis/Pullman comparison is that Wolf Hall (and to lesser degree its two sequels) feel in many ways as wanting to deconstruct the image of both More and Cromwell that A Man for all Seasons didn’t create but certainly popularized for a 20th century audience, and that both works use exactly the same tactics on their protagonist and antagonist characterisation. A Man for All Seasons and Wolf Hall edit out anything a contemporary to the writer audience might not like or even feel repelled by in their respective protagonists (so, among other things, there’s absolutely no mention of the six people executed for heresy during More’s short tenure as Lord Chancellor in A Man for All Seasons, and no mention of Cromwell introducing the bill making male homosexuality a death penalty offense in Wolf Hall and sequels) in order to make their main character the perfect Renaissance guy. While conversely making their antagonist the embodiment of what their contemporary loathes, and editing out their virtues. So Mantel’s More is a religious fanatic with hinted sadism bubbling under the sexually repressed surface while Bolt’s Cromwell is an ambitious state bureaucrat demanding the individual’s complete subjection to whatever the state wants them to believe, who would have reminded the 1960s audience of both Stalinism and MacCarthyism; by contrast, Bolt’s Cromwell isn’t anymore loyal to Wolsey than Mantel’s More is self-deprecating or a tender father to all his children. And so forth.
All this I knew going on based on my admittedly a bit vague memories from the movie version of “A Man for All seasons”, so what caught me by surprise is that the play a) makes more of More’s Catholicism in terms of what he believes in than the movie as opposed to presenting him as an anachronistically 1960s fighter for the freedom of conscience and b) while having Cromwell firmly as the antagonist, makes it clear he doesn’t actually want More dead, he’s arranging for the prison and trial in order to make More publicly submit to Henry’s authority and expects this to be the eventual outcome till shortly before More’s death, and he does so because of More’s Europe wide reputation and the symbolism, not because he has some personal grudge against More. There’s also the difference in acting: Edward Bennett (another Bridgerton alumnus) delivers a very subtle performance as Cromwell, never shouting or muhahaing, but being affable and cool in turn, delivering the occasional cutting one liner with sharp precision. The Cromwell/More sparring scenes certainly were highlights of the production precisely because a lot of emphasis was being put on the both of them being brilliant lawyers, and equal to each other in this regard in the way the other characters aren’t.
Certainly not Henry VIII, who in his one scene comes across as a vainglorious narcissistic toddler who has to be constantly adored and mollified by the people around him but has the charisma and hail-fellow-well-met populist manner to be genuinely popular with a wider public at the same time. No prices for guessing current day associations by not just this particular viewer.
Another core scene with very contemporary associations is More’s argument with his son-in-law William Roper (Sam Philipps). Roper in Bolt’s play starts out as a Lutheran; this is when the play actually hints at More having a set of beliefs a current day audience might not be on board with, when he calls Luther and Roper, at this point not yet engaged to More’s daughter Margaret, both heretics, but then immediately after Roper’s indignant exit tones it down by letting More observe Roper is the type of young person who always jumps on fashionable rebel movements, and he’ll go off Luther the moment the majority becomes pro Luther. Roper then proves him right; the next time we see him he’s still convinced the church needs reforming but has cooled on Luther, and by the time the play ends, when Roman Catholics are becoming a persecuted minority in England, he’s become a hardcore Catholic. The argument scene I’m referring to happens mid play, when More is Lord Chancellor but Cromwell is clearly preparing to gun for him, and Roper asks More why as long as he has still power he doesn’t use that to go after his enemies. More points out there are laws:
William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
You could have heard a pin drop. BTW, More isn’t the only lawyer aware of the danger of precedent in this play; in the second half when talking to Richard Rich Cromwell surprises him by stating he wants More submissive, not dead, because if he creates More’s death, he has a sense that his own days might be numbered one day. (And Bennett plays that line with complete sincerity.) Anyway, to me, this is why this play is still worth staging for more than people interested in Tudor history. Along with the play’s point that its version of More thinks being silent and not voicing his opinion out loud will keep him safe only to realise that in an absolute state silence and neutrality is no longer an option because the paranoid authoritarian state sees even silence as critique and will never be content with less than active collaboration, and with people changing their convictions to whatever the head of state wants them to be.
There are only two female roles, Margaret Roper (More’s oldest daughter and the only one to make it into this play) and Alice More (More’s second wife), and Margaret, amazing female scholar or not, is so relentlessly cheerful and adoring that Alice, played by Abigail Cruttenden, is definitely the better part and comes across as more interesting. She argues with More most of the time without the play implying she’s wrong for doing so, and the scene where, wanting to distract her from trying to convince him to submit and save his life, he compliments her for her cooking, and she says sadly and quietly: “Do you truly think so little of me?” (To assume that she’d be distracted from the main point, and that this is all he can think of to talk to her in this situation) is devastating, with either play or production or both allowing their saintly hero to be in the wrong (and realising it in his reaction when she says this).
Lastly: young Richard Rich (a name one has always to assure people is not invented but real) as a budding snake here is interesting to return to after having read the Shardlake novels (where he becomes the hero’s main antagonist), which were not yet written when I saw the movie version, so the movie was how I got introduced to one of the Tudor era’s biggest and most successful opportunists. As the Common Man in the play points out, while all the Thomases (More, Cromwell, Cramner) get executed or nearly so (Norfolk), Rich in every twist and turn, no matter who is on top, Protestants or Catholics, goes with the current regime, often via betraying his previous set, profits and ends up dying in old age and rich in his bed, having risen as far as Lord Chancellor.
Foundation 3.06: In which the moon isn’t the only thing eclipsed.
The Demerzel and Gaal confrontation was everything I’d hoped for, including Demerzel’s fury at Dawn’s seeming demise (I say seeming because we do have precedent of nanites stopping to work without the Cleon in question being dead) and Gaal convincing her to let her make her case despite near strangulation. (Complete with the news that Demerzel provided original Hari with the data of her millennia of life which allowed him to develop psychohistory to begin with, which I think is from the prequel novels but really works here.) (It also explains where Hari got the money and tech to develop something like the Prime Radiant and the Vault from.) That scene was epic, and is a testimony of how well both characters have been developed through three seasons.
Meanwhile, Brother Day and the audience discover when he has tracked down Song that she did indeed lose her memories (as claimed by Demerzel) of her time with Cleon but has no desire to get them back; what’s more, she’s living already with a life partner, Emma of Normandy from Vikings: Valhalla (I had liked the character and actress there and am glad she got a part in another show I like) and even when Day tries to interest her by pointing out she saw a robot while with him, it only gets him stunned, literally, and captured. Sucks to be Day, I guess, not for the first time. It does leave Dusk and his black hole weapon as the sole Cleon still at large, and given that Demerzel has been able to help Gaal refine her vision and realised Trantor is about to be engulfed in a Black Hole as a consequence of the Mule fight, I very much fear I know where this is going.
Speaking of the Mule: of course Vault!Hari has no idea of his existence. The only reason Hari Prime knew was because of Gaal’s vision, and the Mule as a spontanously occuring Mutant was not something that could be accounted for in calculations. As Vault!Hari was always the smuggest version of the character, it was not a little satisfying to see his stunned expression in the big climax of the episode. Mind you, the way Magnifico acted in this episode rather feeds into my assumption the show will go with a certain element of the books, which again stops me from speculating freely, but if it does there will be more stunned faces all around.
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Date: 2025-08-18 04:26 pm (UTC)I'm enjoying the third act of Martin Shaw's acting career. He keeps popping up in things, and being very good.
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Date: 2025-08-18 10:17 pm (UTC)makes more of More’s Catholicism in terms of what he believes in than the movie as opposed to presenting him as an anachronistically 1960s fighter for the freedom of conscience
Huh -- maybe this was a result of watching it while I was in the middle of my own faith crisis -- but I definitely got that from the movie; I thought that one of the most fascinating things about it (along with the above speech) was that the Catholicism that he's so adamant about preserving is something that in the modern day isn't quite reasonable -- most of us aren't Catholic, and even those of us who are religious, say, wouldn't usually draw the line in quite the same place, so that it becomes a question of, did he really die for nothing, in a sense? And is that something we should celebrate, or is it a colossal waste?
Henry VIII, who in his one scene comes across as a vainglorious narcissistic toddler
hee, I remember this from the movie, too -- which was my first introduction to non-old-fat-Henry VIII! Imprinted on that too.
Haha, I also was convinced while watching that Richard Rich was a made up name (and had to look him up afterwards, and was surprised that he was real).
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Date: 2025-08-18 10:35 pm (UTC)However, I don't think I could ever read Wolf Hall, because the "BUT MY BLORBO!" instinct is too deeply embedded, lol. Never could get as fascinated with Henry VIII for similar reasons.
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Date: 2025-08-19 03:51 pm (UTC)Never mind Wolf Hall, the book where Hilary Mantel proves she truly has it in for Sir Thomas beyond everything he actually did is the last one, The Mirror and the Light, because in it Cromwell finds out that back in the day while he was a prisoner in the Tower, Thomas More found a way to somehow get William Tyndale arrested after his own demise, and is thus to blame for Tyndale’s execution one and a half year after losing his own head. I mean, there are now other novelists who pin Tyndale on him, but as opposed to them Mantel could count, and there is no getting away from the fact that Tyndale died more than a year after More, and that More spend his own last year in the Tower under strict supervision (organized by Cromwell, as it happens). I’m sure he would have if he could have, but he really really really COULD NOT. Being dead is an alibi if ever there was one. Still, in the middle of everything else going on while the Kleves marriage disaster happens, Mantel takes the narrative time to let Cromwell discover he’s been too lenient on More who did one last cruel fanatic thing before dying. I think someone was upset that when the tv version of Wolf Hall came out, there were among the praise some raised eyebrows saying “giving the impression that Thomas More’s main occupation in life before his own arrest was capturing and executing heretics may have been a tad misleading”.
(Mind you, the More: Martyr or Bad Guy? Debate did actually start centuries earlier, because the man was one of the best known humanist writers in Europe, so not only did his execution cause an outcry, which in turn called for some English attempt at counternarrative, but where things really heated up, battling life stories wise, was when the surviving exiled Catholics (including William Roper) came back during Mary Tudor’s reign and the hagiographic biographies were published, and then the now exiled Protestants furiously wrote their own book of Martyrs and went all “you weren’t persecuted, we’re persecuted, and also WHAT ABOUT THOSE SIX DEAD PEOPLE?”)
(My own impression is as usual: it’s complicated. What got people on Team Protestantism especially upset with More at the time, I think, is that Utopia actually does among other things offer a scenario of what we’d call religious toleration (tho, and pre-Luther, More like his bff Erasmus was absolutely calling for reform within the Church. But the emphasis here is on “within”. He was absolutely horrified at the idea of another schism and it causing more and more humans going to hell, and rapidly grew to despise Luther. Not least because Luther who had assumed Erasmus and the humanists would be all on his team was disgusted by Erasmus going for “how about compromise? Moderation?” Instead and unleashed verbal abuse. Well, More was not as nice as Erasmus and he could give out the scatological verbal abuse just as much as Luther could, with the result that if you read some of his anti-Luther writings, especially if you haven’t read Luther’s own abusive writings before, you’re reliably shocked to this day. They went as low as internet trolls today, and this of course is something the More of “A Man for All Seasons” would never do.)
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Date: 2025-08-19 04:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-19 04:11 pm (UTC)Most of you in the US, maybe. Most of me grew up in Bavaria where Catholics are the absolute majority, still. *g* Anyway, I haven’t seen the movie in decades, but in my memories I had the impression that it it cunningly doesn’t let More talk (when he finally, after being condemned, does talk) about any other point of Church dogma than stating that neither Kings nor Parliaments can make someone head of the Church (the play adds that the only heads of the Church can be the successors of Peter to whom Jesus said “you are the rock on which I will build my church”, but I’m not sure whether that second part was even in the film) and that therefore no, he cannot accept the Royal Supremacy. Given that today, no matter what your take on the Pope as the successor of St. Peter or the Catholic Church is, you’d be hardpressed to find someone arguing that Henry VIII, of all the people, was in any way qualified to become Head of the Church, that makes More sound more reasonable than not to a 1960s and onwards audience. Moreover, it’s almost immaterial WHAT exactly he believes, because the opposing side comes across as intrusion of the state, the demand on the individual to abandon his belief and proclaim a new one on the whim of a ruler.
Note that aside from Roper early on being scathing about the sell of indulgences, which was something not only Lutherans objected to and which Humanists like Erasmus and More were in fact also against, no actual Protestant point is raised by anyone to be debated. Henry is just interested in getting a new wife and being obeyed. Cromwell - in great contrast to not just Mantel but other more recent portrayals - is not presented as sincerely interested in reformation and as convinced by the new interpretation as More is by the old, he’s just using the entire matter to climb the career ladder Archbishop Cramner, who would be the most qualified character to make an actual cases for religious points other than the Royal Supremacy, does not do so in the few scenes he shows up in. So I don’t think the film wants its audience to wonder whether or not More was right in what he believed to begin with, because the point is that he (or anyone else) should not have been forced to accept Henry’s right to dictate his beliefs and to demand a profession of belief (as opposed to a profession of citizen loyalty to Henry as a temporal ruler, which More repeatedly gives).
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Date: 2025-08-18 07:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-19 03:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-19 08:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-27 08:36 am (UTC)If you want pro Richard Rich fiction, Mantel in her anti-More-dom presents young Richard Rich as something of a woobie in that in Wolf Hall, Thomas More actually does tell him what Rich then testifies he says and is a horrid snob to and about young Richard. (That he said it is very doubtable, not solely for More's own reasons - why should he keep mum for years and then let himself be goaded into sharing with Richard Rich? - but because the two men who were packing up his books at the same time when asked whether they overheard More saying this to Rich just said they couldn't hear a thing. Now keep in mind Thomas More was done for when these two guys were interrogated, and it would have been in their very best interests to tell Cromwell what he wanted to hear, i.e. backing Rich up and affirm that More had indeed said this. They profited nothing and risked a lot from refusing to do so under the flimsy "couldn't hear what they were saying" excuse. I.e. Almost certainly, Richard Rich lied.) However, in the third of her novels, "The Mirror and the Light", when Rich is incriminating Thomas Cromwell instead of Thomas More, he is now a bad guy and an opportunist.
Conclusion: The great Richard Rich defense novel or play has yet to be written.