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


CHRISTOPHER STEVENS: 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.'

Paul Kaye, magnificently unhinged and spittle-flecked, plays a mad monk called Brother Jerome who is the embarrassment of the Holy Order. 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. There's a flavour of 1950s historical adventure movies, with frequent shots of galloping horsemen, and cloaked figures arriving in mist-swept courtyards.

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