Review: Wolf Hall / Bring Up the Bodies Swan Theatre, Stratford

This production is scheduled to run at Stratford until March 29 but I'd be amazed if such a great new work, bubbling with so much energy and quality, is not transferred to London.

Adapted by Mike Poulton and directed by Jeremy Herrin, these two plays tell the saga of love, lust, conspiracy and absolute power at a crucial moment in English history. Henry VIII's second wife, Anne Boleyn has failed to give him a son. He needs her out of the way.

The action erupts on a bleak, bare stage in Tudor costume, with more codpieces than you can shake a rapier at. It ends in an orgy of bloodletting. At the heart of the drama, and paving the way for a national revolution beyond anyone's imagining, is Henry's Mr Fixit and supreme survivor, Thomas Cromwell. He's played by Ben Miles, probably best known as the dutiful squire Sir Timothy Midwinter in the BBC drama Lark Rise to Candleford.

Last night the two plays were presented one after the other, a six-hour marathon in which Miles gave a spellbinding performance as one of the most complex characters in English history: witty, charming, ruthless, lethal and always a step ahead of Henry VIII, a monarch who regards one unconsidered word or smile as high treason. Nathaniel Parker is a raging-bull Henry, paranoid and all-powerful. Lydia Leonard is a sharp, seductive Anne Boleyn who woos and wins the king, only to see her authority undermined by gossip and Henry falling in love with Miss Seymour (Leah Brotherhead), the original plain Jane.

The supreme irony is that this terrible saga of plots, marriages, miscarriages, divorces and beheadings happens with no-one giving a second thought to Henry and Anne's unwanted baby girl, rejected as a suitable heir and callously dismissed as the "little ginger pig." Or as she later became, England's beloved Queen Elizabeth.

By Peter Rhodes