About the Play:

Wolf Hall is a full-length drama by Hilary Mantel, adapted for the stage by Mike Poulton. Wolf Hall is the first of Mike Poulton's two-part adaptation of Hilary Mantel's Man Booker Prize-winning novels – a thrilling portrait of a brilliant manipulator navigating a high-stakes political landscape. Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies (sometimes collectively billed as Wolf Hall: Parts 1 & 2) are fictional accounts of Thomas Cromwell's rise to power in Court of Henry VIII.

Wolf Hall offers a bold perspective on a classic story of faith, greed, and power. Thomas Cromwell. Son of a blacksmith, political genius, briber, charmer, bully. A man with a deadly expertise in manipulating people and events. Mike Poulton's two-part adaptation of Hilary Mantel's acclaimed novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies is a thrilling and utterly convincing portrait of a brilliant man embroiled in the lethal, high-stakes politics of the Court of Henry VIII. The first part, Wolf Hall, begins in England in 1527. Henry VIII has been King for almost twenty years and is desperate for a male heir; but Cardinal Wolsey is unable to deliver the divorce he craves. Yet for a man with the right talents this crisis would be an opportunity. Into this volatile court enters the commoner Thomas Cromwell who has risen at the side of his beloved mentor Cardinal Wolsey. Once a mercenary and now a master politician, Cromwell will stop at nothing to secure the King's desires while methodically and ruthlessly advancing his own ambitions.

After wildly successful runs at the Royal Shakespeare Company's theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon in 2013 and the Aldwych Theatre in London's West End in 2014, the stage adaptations of Dame Hilary Mantel's Tudor dramas Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, were staged on Broadway at the Winter Garden Theatre in 2015 as Wolf Hall: Parts 1 & 2.

Cast: 5 female, 16 male (doubling, flexible casting)

What people say:

"The extraordinary enthusiasm for these books across page, stage and screen is partly due to the inherent dramatic power of the narratives…[Mantel and Poulton] bring to the familiar tale of doomed wives and religious convulsion a thrilling originality of psychology and storytelling…absolute dramatic clarity with tantalizing historical ambiguity…Mantel and Poulton, while themselves rewriting history, show the king and his spin doctor doing the same." — The Guardian (London)

"…opens like 'House of Cards' and ends like 'Game of Thrones' …Mike Poulton's adaptations keep the language accessible and the political context lucid enough for a general audience. They are also surprisingly funny, with a more broadly comic tone than Mantel's books…elegantly done…History repeats itself, first as farce, then as tragedy…masterful…highly satisfying." — The Hollywood Reporter

"…a superbly tense duet…fiercely intelligent…Mantel's inspired approach, echoed by adaptor Mike Poulton, was to take the decade covering the rise and fall of Anne Boleyn and present everything from an entirely unexpected perspective: that of Cromwell, who rose inexorably from being the son of a blacksmith to becoming the second most powerful man in the kingdom…Poulton ensure[s] the stakes remain high and audiences engaged by the interstices of plots and counterplots." — Variety

"…the real emotional tension resides mainly in the developing intimacy between Henry and Cromwell, and the disbelieving outrage that it provokes in the old aristocracy…an inexorable tragic momentum…a taut intelligence, and a subtle awareness of the parallels between Tudor times and our own…their verve, intelligence and wit are exhilarating." — The Telegraph (London)

About the Playwright:

Hilary Mantel is an English novelist and short-story writer, best known for her Booker Prize-winning historical novels Wolf Hall and its sequel Bring Up the Bodies.

Mike Poulton has built a reputation in British theatre as an English translator and adapter of classic texts for contemporary performance. His critically acclaimed adaptations have won seven major awards on Broadway, including two Tonys.