The Wolf Hall novelist on stage adaptations, illness and how morphine helped her track down Margaret Thatcher's assassinl
Hilary Mantel: 'I wanted to write the Cromwell books right at the beginning of my career.' Photograph: Murdo MacLeod
How easy has the RSC's recent theatre adaptation of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies been for you?
I am a very deliberate and cautious person and I am used to turning things over in the silence and privacy of my mind for hours and hours. In the theatre it is not like that. When you are in rehearsal and asked a question the answer has to come back immediately. I have made a profession of doubting myself, so it is something very new to be instinctive.
Have you felt a kindred spirit with the actors in the risk of bringing your characters – Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII and the rest – to life?
Surprisingly I have. I always write in terms of scenes, and for a big scene in one of the Cromwell novels I will prepare for several days by going through all my notes and all my sources before diving into the writing. At that moment where I commit to the writing it is exactly like walking on stage. All your senses are alive and it is as if you are straining your ears for the sound of a response.
When were you first enthralled by theatre?
I wasn't from a theatre-going background at all. I first went to Stratford-on-Avon the summer of my 16th birthday with two friends from school. We organised ourselves and saw four plays in three days. After that it became a very big thing in our lives. So to have been arriving in Stratford-on-Avon these last months and thinking "I am going to work" has been a really wonderful feeling.
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I am a very deliberate and cautious person and I am used to turning things over in the silence and privacy of my mind for hours and hours. In the theatre it is not like that. When you are in rehearsal and asked a question the answer has to come back immediately. I have made a profession of doubting myself, so it is something very new to be instinctive.
Have you felt a kindred spirit with the actors in the risk of bringing your characters – Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII and the rest – to life?
Surprisingly I have. I always write in terms of scenes, and for a big scene in one of the Cromwell novels I will prepare for several days by going through all my notes and all my sources before diving into the writing. At that moment where I commit to the writing it is exactly like walking on stage. All your senses are alive and it is as if you are straining your ears for the sound of a response.
When were you first enthralled by theatre?
I wasn't from a theatre-going background at all. I first went to Stratford-on-Avon the summer of my 16th birthday with two friends from school. We organised ourselves and saw four plays in three days. After that it became a very big thing in our lives. So to have been arriving in Stratford-on-Avon these last months and thinking "I am going to work" has been a really wonderful feeling.
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