Robert Bolt's play about Sir Thomas More survives largely as a star-vehicle and a piece of theatrical hagiography. But, while Martin Shaw gives a fine performance as the obdurate hero in Michael Rudman's spectacular production, Bolt gives us a sanitised view of English history.
More, as everyone knows, resists state pressure to support Henry VIII's annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and subsequent break with Rome. And we are clearly meant to admire More for his unflinching moral integrity. But his legal refuge in silence means that his views are never intellectually tested, and Bolt gives little hint of the More who tenaciously pursued Protestant heretics and who believed they were "well and worthely burned". We hear even less of More, the scatalogical obsessive, who claimed that Luther farts anathema and that it would be right to piss in his mouth.
The play makes more sense if seen as a study of the 1960s than the 1530s. Bolt claimed he was drawn to More as a man with "an adamantine sense of his own self": he contrasted that with modern man's value-free, materialist existence. That explains Bolt's contentious creation of the Common Man, robustly played by Tony Bell, who symbolises the conscienceless opportunism of the Macmillan era. But Bolt, a passionate supporter of CND, is really writing a love-letter to a martyred hero who put principles before personal safety.
Even if the result is a rose-tinted view of More, Shaw avoids the trap of investing him with premature sainthood. He roughly chastises his wife, tongue-lashes his future son-in-law and displays real anger in his trial when he cries "a man's soul is his self". Shaw is also excellent in the two best scenes in the play: those where More diplomatically evades the king's demands and where he all but breaks down in the face of his family's entreaties. But precisely because Shaw gives us glimpses of More's hidden fire, you wish Bolt's play acknowledged his hero's scholarly fanaticism.
Daniel Flynn is a glamorously intemperate Henry VIII, Clive Carter a suitably Machiavellian Thomas Cromwell and Alison Fiske a superbly disgruntled Lady Alice More who justly wonders why her husband can't open his heart to her. Paul Farnsworth's sets, with their panelled background of beaten gold, also create a sense of Tudor opulence. But Bolt's play is romanticised history that never lets us see More as the executant of state power as well as its tragic victim.
· Until April 8. Box office: 0870 901 3356.
