Wolf Hall (BBC 2015)

She issued a sharp warning to the BBC earlier this year not to dumb down and oversimplify history in its adaptation of her bestselling novel Wolf Hall. But the Booker prizewinning author Hilary Mantel has given her seal of approval to the dramatisation of her historical books documenting Thomas Cromwell’s rise to power in Henry VIII’s court.

Speaking at the Cheltenham literary festival earlier this year, Mantel cautioned against forgoing the painstaking historical accuracy of her books for the sake of good television.

“As soon as you decide this is too complicated for the viewer, or history is an inconvenient shape and can’t we just tidy it up a bit, then you fall into a cascade of errors which ends in nonsense,” she said.

However, after a preview screening of the first of six episodes of Wolf Hall, due to be aired on BBC2 early next year, Mantel said while her expectations had been high, the televised drama had exceeded them. She had been impressed, she said by “the concision and coherence of the storytelling, in the originality of the interpretations, in the break from the romantic cliches of the genre: in the wit and style and heart.”

Mantel added: “It’s illuminating, exciting, yet also curious, to see how my imagination matched theirs. Particularly with characters where there is no portrait, where my books had to conjure them from thin air: how would they appear? … Every face seems to me one that Holbein would recognise, even if he didn’t paint it.”

Mantel spent five years researching Wolf Hall and its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, to ensure her revisionist take on history was entrenched in the real events of the time. Both the scriptwriter, Peter Straughan, and director, Peter Kosminsky, said they had felt a duty to honour this aspect of the novels and consulted Mantel at various stages of the adaptation.

Despite initial plans to make the series in Belgium, the producer, Colin Callender, said that thanks to the recent television tax breaks, they had been able to film in various National Trust houses, many dating to Tudor times and often places where Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn – played in the series by Damian Lewis and Claire Foy – had walked the corridors hundreds of years before. Even the lighting of the BBC production was kept realistic, with most of the night scenes lit only by candles.

Kosminsky said directing Wolf Hall had been one his most daunting projects. “What was so wonderful and liberating was when I met Hilary and she said, ‘If I can give you one piece of advice it’s to remember that these characters do not know that they are in history,’” he recalled. “For them, this is real life. Henry doesn’t know he is going to have six wives, Anne doesn’t know her end. As far as they are concerned, if they make one decision their life goes that way and if they make another decision their life goes in a completely different direction, as it is for us. And that was what we all tried to do, get that feeling – in the shooting style, in the way the costumes worked – that we were making this exactly as if we were shooting a drama today.”

Straughan’s script has remained faithful to Mantel’s books, though he admitted that condensing 1,000 pages into just six episodes had been a challenge. As in print, the television adaptation is as seen through the eyes of Cromwell, played by Mark Rylance, who said: “The fact that Cromwell keeps his thoughts and judgments so close to his chest, doesn’t reveal them and doesn’t show very much – that was very challenging.”

“I expect a lot of people who will watch the programme will also have read the books so I wanted to manifest him in some way that would not limit people’s already potent imagination of who Cromwell is, but also make him into a real person.”

Rylance, who was artistic director of the Globe theatre for 10 years and is therefore used to the weighty and often impractical Tudor costumes required on the Wolf Hall set, said he had only one complaint about the whole production. “The costumes were pretty good,” he said, “but the codpieces were just too small.”

The director of the six-part series, Peter Kosminsky, who is known for his minute attention to authentic detail, used an Arri Alexa camera to film all the night-time scenes by candlelight.

“With the advent of the Alexa camera it is actually possible to shoot by candlelight,” he said. “One of the extraordinary things was to be in some of these rooms where the characters had stood and to light the rooms as they had been built to be lit – not by floodlights and space lanterns in the ceiling but by candlelight.”