Parents at each other’s throats; kids fighting over their inheritance; Dad’s hot young girlfriend serving up the mulled wine. Who knew the mighty Plantagenets were so suburban? Henry II’s Christmas court at Chinon could be a seasonal scene by Alan Ayckbourn – although our laureate of the living-room would have furnished it with sharp, sour, comic characters instead of chessmen on a historical strategy board.
Joanna Lumley is catty and luminously vulnerable as medieval Tiger mum Eleanor of Acquitaine: mother of ten and queen of both France and England in her exceptionally long lifetime. She doesn’t rise to the glacial heights of superbitchery that Katharine Hepburn scaled in the 1968 film. But her status as the Forces’ Sweetheart can only be enhanced by Eleanor’s tremendous anecdote about riding bare-breasted on Crusade (‘I damn near died of windburn,’ she cries, with plummy, irresistible relish).
Lumley and Robert Lindsay – playing her husband and gaoler, Henry II – are well cast. The ever-mordant Lindsay dominates, as the soldier who spawned sons so troublesome they were nicknamed the Devil’s Brood. But James Goldman’s play is not so enduring as the monarchs it portrays.
A historical romance whose fussy Gordian knots of plotting are occasionally sliced open by wintry one-liners (‘Shall we hang the holly first or each other?’); it desperately needs big-screen scenery and swordfights to widen its horizons.
Creaky direction from Trevor Nunn and at least one shamefully corny turn from the younger generation quench its sparkle.
To work as a retro crowd-pleaser, this needs to be sexy as hell and dripping with malice. Instead, Nunn’s production goes halfway to humanising these medieval monsters and ends up trimming their claws. Thanks largely to Lindsay, there’s a bit of roar in the old beast. But this ‘Lion’ is a pussycat.