Hilary Mantel: Scripts are like Earthworms

I had imagined my work enacted under a fierce light, myself passive in the dark. But Tudors keep talking to me. I sit and tap out the missing scene: Rome, revenues, joke, church courts, joke. No one keeps tally or track of who writes what. Anything written is undone within minutes. It’s like sieving water. I become less of a scholar, more of a choreographer. Those scenes before the birth of Elizabeth ... why don’t we dance this bit of the story?

Language must be spare. It must be clear, vital. Sometimes I scuff bits out: “Sounds like a historical novel,” I say apologetically. I am glad when real Tudor words make the cut. Cardinal Wolsey’s ghost narrates his own death: “A pain as cold as a whetstone.” Anne Boleyn accuses a courier: “You look for dead men’s shoes.” Snipped from the record, processed into a novel, recycled into script, sieved through 10 drafts, through 20, they stick because they’re the best words. The dead are speaking to us, hand on our arm.

There is a script reading. It takes place in midwinter, in a freezing hired hall, with only the pop and hiss of paraffin heaters to stop us turning to ice; we are as cold as Tudors. Each play seems to go on for a week. More drafts ensue. The scripts are like earthworms. You cut them in half but they regenerate. I think they write themselves by night.

How do you put Henry VIII onstage? How do you play Bluebeard, the wife-slayer? The expectations would crush the most robust actor. When Nat Parker comes into the rehearsal room, he is a gold and amber presence, voice as rich as brocade. But there is something in his gaze, a look of ingenuousness, that suggests he thinks the world was made that morning, and just for him. His eyes are warm and brown, unlike the little blue eyes of Henry Tudor. He walks to the front of the stage and tells the audience how much he wants a son. “This is how I’m fixed,” he says. “You see how I’m fixed? How would you feel, in my place?”

Not those words, exactly. “What does God want of me?” he asks. It seems such an impossible question. And he, so eager to please. I say to the cast, “Henry didn’t know he was going to have six wives. Each time he thought, here’s the girl for me.” People smile, but they grasp the essential thing. The characters don’t know their own fates. They can’t learn a lesson from themselves, and draw a moral. We have scripts, but they don’t. They are trapped in 50 years of improvisation, called life.

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