Ten years later, Wolf Hall is still majestic (critic)

After a masterful first season, the British historical series returns in force with the suite. A season 2 all in sobriety, political tension and sublime reconstruction: a lesson in staging and writing carried by a Mark Rylance always imperial.

The Targaryen can get dressed!

More terrifying than the mad king of Westeros, the sovereign of England Henri VIII (Damian Lewis, disturbing like never) marked the 16th century with his bloody reign, chaining the wives – bending them if necessary – supported by the relentless Thomas Cromwell, master strategist and manipulator of the shadow. It is the edifying ascent of this rotary lawyer says Wolf Hall. Ten years after a breathtaking first season retracing its climb to power, the British series makes a bright return with a second equally masterful season.

So we advance in time. Just after the execution of Anne Boleyn – who opens season 2 in an frosty way – Cromwell continues his career as an advisor, making the rain and the good weather at the court of Henri VIII, a monarch establishing the Anglican Church to be able to remarry as he pleases, against the Pope and the Catholic neighbors …

Wolf Hall returns without having lost an ounce of his sharp lucidity or his sharp intelligence. The director Peter Kosminsky and the screenwriter Peter Straughan go to the end of their adaptation of the novels of Hilary Mantel, weaving a historic fresco of a rare wealth.

On a thread between period drama and quasi-documentary representation, they depict with exceptional meticulousness the torments of the Court of England under the Tudor. Crossing by a constant concern for detail – even in the lighting of the candle – and filmed in decorations of the subjecting period, the reconstruction is sumptuous. The narration never yields to the sirens of grandiloquence.

All this is certainly a little austere and not really spectacular. But Wolf Hall assumes dry elegance and multiplies millimeter jousts. Each replica seems to be weighed in the trebuchet. A chiseled writing, at the height of the immense Mark Rylance, which evolves in the mysteries of power with a fascinating phlegm. And his Cromwell, all in nuances and smiles in the corner, becomes a political figure as disturbing as it is overwhelming.

The six episodes of Wolf Hall season 2 are already available online on Arte.TV (see below) and will be broadcast on television from Thursday, September 4 on Arte.