The Lion in Winter
Written by James Goldman
Directed by Evan Jackson
At the Side Project Theatre, Chicago
Produced by Idle Muse Theatre Company
A review by M. D. Ball of the performance on Aug. 27, 2011
In the year 1183, the court of Henry II was not the polished, refined, and orderly world of Elizabeth II in 2011. The royal family itself had to contend with squalor, at least by modern standards, and a prince might easily smell of compost, as we learn in this play. The castle was windy, cold, and dark, treachery lay around every corner, and the ever-present threat of assassination hung low in the air. This, despite the belief that God appointed monarchs.
The action of The Lion in Winter takes place on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in 1183 in the castle of Henry II in Chinon, which is a region of France under English rule. The King has called a Christmas court, for which purpose he's temporarily relased his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, from prison. At the age of 50, Henry is uncommonly old for a man of the 12th century, and he wants to appoint an heir to the throne. Their three sons, Richard, Geoffrey, and John, are all vying for that privilege. Henry favors John as heir, whereas Eleanor favors Richard. Meanwhile, Philip II, King of France, has also appeared at court in order to remind Henry of a treaty he signed years earlier, a treaty committing Henry's heir to marry Philip's half-sister Alais, who, in a further complication, became Henry's mistress seven years ago and remains so today.
What quickly unfolds is a savage family dynamic. The characters plot against each other. They conspire. They lie, snipe, cheat, scream, bully, and threaten. They even come very close to murder. And pushing it all forward are the usual motivators: jealousy, love, hatred, resentment, greed, revenge, and narcissism. In fact, if we lower the play's volume, sophisticate the emotions, and jump ahead eight centuries, we might find ourselves in a story by Tennessee Williams. Family dysfunctionality knows no single epoch.
Lest my reader ask why anyone would want to watch such an oppressive story, I hasten to point out that the characters are products of their times. While that's not an excuse for their barbarism, albeit restrained barbarism, it does explain it. And in that very explanation is Lion's twofold strength (or redemption, for the skeptic): the literacy of its script and the complexity of its characters. All of them, young and old, know how they behave, how they should behave, and how the others perceive their behavior. So alert are they, so sensitive to every stimulus, so poised to pounce, that every ping a character sends out returns a pong that triggers an immediate reaction, often a visceral reaction that only deepens the trench warfare.
In this review, I want to refrain from comparing this production to the 1968 motion picture of the same name, a movie that ranks among the best ever to come out of Hollywood, but that goal is impossible even for a man who argues that any production of a play, whether or not it's been adapted to the big screen, should stand on its own merits or fall on its own demerits. So, I begin here by praising the two actors who gave the best performances in this production of Lion by Idle Muse. First, there's Brian Bengtson, who played Henry and Eleanor's youngest son, John. At 17 years old, John is sullen, insecure, and puerile. Yet, he's Henry's favorite for succession to the throne. Bengtson had the unenviable challenge of playing someone who could easily have no redeeming personal qualities, no inherent fascination, and no exquisite complexity -- in other words, a predictable, insipid character. Bengtson's task, therefore, was to make John interesting. And he succeeded. He found in John's persona both the "spoiled brat", which is simple, and the child who's least qualified to be King but who's just smart enough to be embarrassed by that deficiency. John's overreactions and tantrums felt sincere, and they revealed his awareness of what was happening around him and of his near helplessness to stop it by any means other than what desperation might afford him. Although John was perpetually suspicious, frightened, and angry, and all with good reason, Bengtson created some sympathy for him by suggesting the innocent victim, the young boy swept up into an emotional tornado that he didn't create but that ripped through his childhood.
The second stellar performance came from Nathan Thompson, who played Philip, King of France. Despite being only 18 years old, Philip has a sharp instinct for reading and manipulating people, and he uses that skill to advance his own agenda by pitting his opponents against each other. Thompson, whose only glaring weakness was his faux French accent, showed nearly perfect timing throughout. By means of his replies and reactions, he dovetailed beautifully with the other characters, with ballet-like gracefulness, letting Philip play the others for fools and exploit the family's penchant for self-destruction. This Philip was a smooth, composed young villain whose cunning and wit allowed him, at little risk to himself, to catalyze chain reactions that would bring about the results he was seeking. He embodied the maxim that it's better to work smartly than diligently. Under Thompson's firm control, Philip was clearly but calmly proactive, and he used his ready wit like Zorro used his blade.
The role of Queen Eleanor, to which, in the movie, Katherine Hepburn brought the full force of her formidable acumen and unapologetic feminism, requires an actress who shows poise, who projects a somewhat phlegmatic authority, and who displays warmth when it's safe for the Queen to do so. In this production, Elizabeth MacDougald might have succeeded -- without copying Hepburn -- if not for two flaws in her characterization. First, she was inconsistent; her acting sometimes impeded itself, and at each of those times she was briefly but noticeably awkward. In other words, she sometimes lost command of her interpretation. Second, she displayed more malevolence than stridence, making Eleanor seem less a strong, smart woman defending herself in a hateful family within a misogynistic world, than just another rapacious member of the ruling elite.
In Dave Skvarla's Henry Plantagenet, we saw a grossly self-indulgent adolescent in the body of a quinquagenarian who, by virtue of either fortitude, stubbornness, or good luck, had beaten the odds for medieval life expectancy. As though his teenage hormones were still raging, his mood swings were frequent and wide, and his explosions of anger were just as intense as his eruptions of tenderness. He bellowed and bulldozed as though God hadn't appointed him but as though he had appointed God. In the movie, Peter O'Toole's Henry was just a little more chary than Skvarla's, the latter's being more juvenile and impetuous. Moreover, O'Toole let Henry show a soupçon of disgust at his own cruelty, whereas Skvarla let the king's childishness suppress whatever conscience maturity usually develops.
Bitterness, especially when wound around egomania, is dangerous. And Edward Karch gave Prince Richard's bitterness a very sharp edge. It was easy to believe that Karch's Richard was a soldier both by practice and by nature, always ready to settle a dispute with violence. Nevertheless, in those few moments when Richard let down his guard, Karch made it equally easy to believe that his character's toughness had evolved to prevent further breaking of his heart. The contrast between his bravado in contests and his vulnerability in gentle encounters was uncomfortable, as it should be, because Richard deeply wanted love that he knew he'd never permit himself to nurture.
The overarching theme of Geoffrey's psychology is his desire that at least one of his parents love him. Being the cerebral son, he understands his role and the roles of his brothers as pawns in the incessant fighting and scheming of the King and Queen. But from Eleanor's preference for Richard and Henry's for John, Geoffrey wrongly infers that he is the only son whom neither parent loves. Nathan Pease allowed this misunderstanding, or so it seemed to me, to set Geoffrey apart from Richard and John and create an emotional bubble that enclosed everyone in the family but himself. He felt solitary to himself and to me.
The unsung role in this play belongs to Alais, Philip's half-sister and Henry's mistress, played in this production by Alex Fisher. Everyone in the family underestimates her intelligence; even Henry, with whom she's in love, doesn't fully appreciate her power over him. Early on, Fisher kept Alais' true heart and mind hidden behind the façade of a silly young woman infatuated with the King of England. As the story unfolded, however, she gradually opened Alais to us until we found ourselves watching either the evolution or revelation of ruthlessness where we hadn't been expecting it. By symbolizing the fact of life that power corrupts, her metamorphosis captures everything revolting about this family, and summarizes in a single character, who might have remained respectable otherwise, the viciousness of every other character in the play. But, whether intentionally or not, Fisher didn't convince me that her Alais really had gone over to the dark side; I was uncertain that it wasn't her own clever machination designed to force the others into a confrontation with their own evil ways. What a delicious ambiguity with which to walk away from this play after the curtain fell.