Shardlake Review: Murder, mad monks and menacing Sean Bean in a brutal Tudor mystery, writes CHRISTOPHER STEVENS

Shardlake (Disney+)

Rating:

Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s right-hand man, had a head like a toad. We can see his fat jowls and tiny eyes in the portrait by Hans Holbein.

It’s impossible that anyone, least of all the vain monarch, ever looked at Cromwell and thought, ‘In 500 years that bloke is going to be a sex symbol.’

But the son of a Putney blacksmith has been played by James Frain in The Tudors, Mark Rylance in Wolf Hall (adapted from the books by Dame Hilary Mantel, who confessed she was in love with her Cromwell), and now Sean Bean in the Tudor detective thriller Shardlake.

He was also portrayed by Kenneth Williams in Carry On Henry, though Barbara Windsor was the only sex symbol in that version of history.

Arthur Hughes struggles to impose himself as the sleuth Matthew Shardlake. Arthur Hughes, left, and Anthony Boyle in a scene from Shardlake

Bean has no patience with the notion of Cromwell as a great reformer or moralist. He’s greedy, vicious, power-hungry and bullying. And that’s if you catch him on a good day.

This lavish four-part adaptation of an erudite whodunnit, Dissolution, by novelist C.J. Sansom, who sadly died last week, opens with the murder of a royal henchman at a monastery.

The king’s man is beheaded in the dead of night while prowling the kitchens. That’s a cruel punishment for fancying a midnight snack, but these were brutal times.

Dispatching an investigator to find the killer, Bean plays Cromwell as a softly-spoken thug whose every word conceals a trap. It’s a scene of real menace, but far from the only supporting role that threatens to dominate the show.

Paul Kaye, magnificently unhinged and spittle-flecked, plays a mad monk called Brother Jerome who is the embarrassment of the Holy Order.

And Tadhg Murphy is hilariously fawning as Justice Copynger, the local magistrate with a hairdo like historian Neil Oliver.

This lavish four-part adaptation of an erudite whodunnit, Dissolution, by novelist C.J. Sansom. Pictured: Ruby Ashbourne Serkis in a scene from Shardlake

Against competition like that, Arthur Hughes struggles to impose himself as the sleuth Matthew Shardlake. Born with radial dysplasia, a deformity of the arm, the actor magnifies his disability to convey Shardlake’s crooked spine and his limp — strapping himself into a leather corset every morning to straighten his back.

He is also given to talking to himself, a quirk that is meant to let us eavesdrop on his thoughts, though it leaves a nagging impression that the detective is slightly doolally.

His sidekick is Anthony Boyle, as Cromwell’s spy Jack Barak, who has the advantage of a lairy Jack-the-lad charisma. Eyeing up a housemaid, he declares her ‘well built’. She remarks on his codpiece. All this leaves Shardlake himself looking rather dull.

There’s a flavour of 1950s historical adventure movies, with frequent shots of galloping horsemen, and cloaked figures arriving in mist-swept courtyards. There’s no lack of confidence about the production. Its tagline proclaims, ‘God knows who did it!’

If ever you wanted an example of how irrelevant religion has become in modern life, think of family-friendly Disney advertising a show with a joke like that.