The Lion in Winter

Synopsis

Robert Lindsay & Joanna Lumley star in James Goldman's The Lion in Winter for a limited season at the Theatre Royal Haymarket., directed by Trevor Nunn.

In The Lion in Winter, a family Christmas becomes a family at war. Henry II, not so young as he was, invites his estranged wife Eleanor of Aquitane, and his three sons, Richard, Geoffrey and John, to spend the festive season with him, his mistress Princess Alais, and her brother, the young King Philip of France. Will Henry name who is to be his successor as King of England? Their yuletide celebration turns into a combat zone of deceit, betrayal, bitter power games and scabrous wit.

The Lion in Winter was famously made into a 1968 film starring Katharine Hepburn and Peter O'Toole. It was revived on Broadway in 1999 in a production starring Hollywood’s Laurence Fishburne as Henry and Stockard Channing as Eleanor.

The Lion In Winter will return Robert Lindsay to the Haymarket, where he last played Cyrano de Bergerac in 1992. His many other stage credits include Me and My Girl (which won him an a Olivier and a Tony), Oliver! (which won him another Olivier), The Entertainer, Richard III and, last year in the West End, Onassis.

Joanna Lumley’s most recent stage credits include The Cherry Orchard, Blithe Spirit, Hedda Gabler, The Letter and La Bete, in which she made her Broadway debut after its West End run last year. 

Book you The Lion in Winter tickets today for what promises to be one of the hits of the London Winter season!

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 16 November 2011

As a play that doggedly refuses to bare its teeth, The Lion in Winter is more like a lambkin in spring. James Goldman’s 1966 Broadway play was a flop at the time, but the title still resonates because of the movie.

So, on paper at least, this sounded like a good seasonal bet for Trevor Nunn’s final throw in his Haymarket tenure as artistic director: a solid historical drama with all the trimmings and the star power of Robert Lindsay as the gruff, Lear-like Henry II and Joanna Lumley as his imprisoned queen.

Instead, we seem to have run into a diluted medieval version of an Alan Ayckbourn play, set around the Christmas tree in Henry’s French chateau, where family divisions and the future of the king’s occupation of France are batted around like, well, a whole lot of balls.

“It’s 1183 – and we are still barbarians!” You could have fooled me. At least Peter O'Toole tears into the ro...

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Latest User Review

David Baxter - 27 January 2012:

What on earth has got in to Trevor Nunn? After years of increasingly ponderous devotion to Shakespeare and other worthy revivals, he's suddenly gone all Blackadder or 1066 and All That. This wildly improbable story of Henry II, his mistress, his queen temporarily released from prison and three disputatious sons is played almost exclusively for laughs and appropriately stars Robert Lindsay in what could be a pilot for a new sitcom - My Plantagenet Family. To be fair the first half is frequently very funny as the one liners are traded back and forth as the family gather for the sort of Christmas Alan Ayckbourn would be proud of. After the interval it all gets a bit bogged down and the convoluted betrayals and double crosses become wearisome. At least it proves that Joanna Lumley is a credible stage actress as Eleanor even if some of her gestures are a bit over-stated. If the energy and humour of the first half had been maintained this could have been quite a jolly romp but it's as if everybody lost their nerve and tried to inject some authentic history which James Goldman's rather silly story cannot support....

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