In “Wolf Hall,” Ben Miles plays Thomas Cromwell, the wily tactician who helped Henry VIII end his first two marriages, one by divorce, the other with a beheading. PHOTOGRAPH BY SARA KRULWICH/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX

How do you turn a novel into a play? It depends on the novel. Take, for instance, the current Broadway production of “Wolf Hall,” an adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s novel of the same name, plus its sequel, “Bring Up the Bodies.” The production is, in fact, two plays, one for each of the books, intended to be seen one after the other, on the same day.

The set is almost blank: a background painted to look like a wall of concrete, virtually no furniture; the only brightness or movement is a low line of flames that springs up now and then to create a fireplace. A set like that draws attention to the difference between the play and book, and makes a virtue of it. This is theatre reduced to its essence, the set says. Places, actions, and emotions will be evoked by speech and movement alone here, without any of the description or narration of a novel.

The set has another effect, too. Usually you get through much more plot in a two-hour film than in a three-hour play. Part of the reason is convention: plays tend to take advantage of the emotional claustrophobia of the theatre, trapping the characters and the audience within tight limits of time and place. But another reason is technical: plays usually have sets, so they can’t leap about from one place to another with the agility of a film. Because the “Wolf Hall” set is so minimal, though, it doesn’t anchor the scenes to a particular location. The setting can be inside or outside, palace or street. For this reason, the play can cut back and forth between different scenes almost as quickly and cleanly as a film can, and it does.

The need for speed appears to have been much on the mind of Mike Poulton, who, along with Mantel, adapted the books for the stage. The two plays add up to five and a half hours, which is a long time, but they’re attempting to incorporate more than a thousand pages of novel. Poulton wanted the action to move quickly, both to include as much material as he could and also, presumably, to avoid any hint of costume-drama ponderosity. He told the Financial Times that one of the differences between a novel and a play was that, when reading a novel, you can take your time, whereas, in a play, “you cannot afford to pause and reflect: you want people to be sitting on the edge of their seats.” He knew that he didn’t want an onstage narrator, because that would be a “pace-killer.” Things had to be kept moving. The speeches are short. Most of the scenes are short. The characters enter fast and exit fast and talk fast and stride about as they speak.

The dialogue in all Mantel’s novels is so vivid, and carries so much of the story, that her books, in places, read like dramas. “Wolf Hall” is no exception. It’s also written in the present tense, which creates the same sense of urgency and immediacy that you get in the theatre, sitting in the same room as the characters, watching them react. But “Wolf Hall” is deeply a novel. It is interior, slow, dense, rich, complex in structure and multifarious in content. It traces the ascent of the wily tactician Thomas Cromwell from his gutter origins in Putney to the height of power in the court of Henry VIII. Its central story is Cromwell’s arranging for Henry’s divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, and his marriage to his second wife, Anne Boleyn, thereby severing England’s relationship with the Pope and founding the Church of England. But, along the way, it also touches on the coming of the English Bible, the dissolution (in both senses) of the monasteries, and the institution of an income tax, uniform law, and parish records, in addition to Cromwell’s family life. Its dozens of characters and years and complicated events are seen through one set of eyes, those of Cromwell. His consciousness makes all its elements into one story.

“Bring Up the Bodies” is very different. It is swift, economical, single-minded. Its action takes place over a few weeks, and propels toward one end: killing Anne Boleyn. Cromwell has been charged by the King with ridding him of his second wife through any apparently legitimate means; and, in the course of his efficient management of this task, Cromwell arranges not only the prosecution and execution of Anne but also that of five enemies of his beloved mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, whom he has long wanted to punish. We still see the action from Cromwell’s point of view, as we did in “Wolf Hall,” but, in this book, his point of view is no longer the point: the crux of the novel is the savagely virtuoso scenes of trickery and interrogation, in which, one by one, he assembles and constructs the evidence against those who must be found guilty.

Perhaps for this reason, the second play works better than the first. The first, moving at breakneck speed, attempts to incorporate dozens of the disparate strands of “Wolf Hall,” without the interior consciousness that unified them in the book. Cromwell is always there onstage, but we’re watching him from the outside—especially in an enormous theatre like the Winter Garden. Possibly in an effort to address this distance, to bring us closer, Cromwell in the first play, played by the superb Ben Miles, is a bit too likable. It’s true that it was one of Mantel’s innovations in the books to extract Cromwell from his reputation as a quasi-satanic Machiavel and infuse him with loyalty and warmth (Thomas More she pushed in the other direction, from saint to inquisitor). But you feel his love and loyalty far more than the amoral brilliance that is the purpose and delight of his character.

“Bring Up the Bodies,” with the focussed relentlessness of its plot and its dependence on verbal jousting rather than the inflections of consciousness, is halfway to a play already, so the play version loses much less. And, because its focus is Cromwell’s evisceration of his enemies, his character gets back some of the lawyerly brutality that it had in the book. This is good. It’s all very well to be shown that the great fixer of Tudor politics was a real person with emotions like ours, but he should not seem too familiar. He is already so close, there on the stage, that the play runs the risk of letting you forget how distant Cromwell really is. There are costumes to remind you, but with the modern set, and without the density of historical description and narration that you get in the books, the astonishing cruelty of his actions is the best way to convey that he is not familiar at all.