THERE’S a famous exchange towards the end of the play A Man For All Seasons. The setting is Tutor England, circa 1530. Sir Thomas More is on trial for his life for refusing to smile on King Henry VIII’s divorce and remarriage to Katherine of Aragon. The star witness against him is Sir Richard Rich.

We meet Rich at the start of the play as an indigent young lawyer of weak ­character, begging More for permanent employment. More refuses to find a place for him, and Rich falls into bad company, becoming a creature of the mercurial King Henry’s new enforcer Thomas Cromwell.

In Robert Bolt’s version of the story, Cromwell induces Rich to perjure himself to incriminate More for treason. In the film, he’s played by a young John Hurt, ­under a thin moustache, suddenly togged up in silks and satins.

Having loyally borne false witness against his old mentor, as Rich exits the stage, More notices a bright new chain of office hangs about Rich’s neck. It bears the red dragon: Y Ddraig Goch. For services rendered, Rich is to be made ­attorney-general for Wales.

“Why Richard,” More says, “It profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world – but for Wales?”

The first instinct of most actors is to play the moment sarcastically, as an easy ­laugh at the expense of our Celtic ­cousins. But in the 1966 film of the play, Paul ­Schofield made a different and much more interesting dramatic choice.

He played the moment straight and sad, losing the laugh but gaining pathos. “But for Wales?” Schofield says, sadly, ­leaving the well-dressed young man with all his ­material gains, and his compromised ­conscience, and More to the ­inevitability of the king’s vengeance and the ­headsman. The reading amplified what the joke couldn’t – that Rich’s ill-gotten bling at once social exalted and spiritually ­diminished him.

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