The Lion in Winter
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Review of The Lion in Winter
TimeLine's intimate 'Lion' shines through the haze

reviewed by Michael Phillips
Chicago Tribune
10/6/2003

Those looking for a solid, juicy revival of THE LION IN WINTER, a lot of people's favorite wisecracking history pageant, need look no further than TimeLine Theatre Company.

Director Nick Bowling takes every advantage of the high-ceiling church space rented by TimeLine, home not long ago to a terrific AWAKE AND SING! This time the playing area's cut into quadrants, placing the audience smack at the heels of King Henry II, his imprisoned queen Eleanor of Aquitaine and their grasping sons. The narrow intersecting walkways provided by scenic designer Kevin Hagan end in four canopied entry points.

At the intersection's center sits a crown on a stool. Uneasy — neurotic, even — lie the heads doing their best to wear this headgear.

Playwright James Goldman's 12th Century romp is a matter of dueling reputations, which goes for the characters as well as the play itself. Set at Christmastime in 1183 in the South of France, in various rooms at Chinon Castle, "Lion" concerns Henry's succession. The king likes the idea of marrying off his mistress, the King of France's sister, to son John, thereby keeping huge tracts of land in the family. But sons Richard and Geoffrey are vying for the crown as well. The crosses and double-crosses pile up. The bitchiness quotient can barely be charted.

The 1968 film version of Goldman's play, which hits the AMC rotation on cable fairly regularly, reminds you why many folks are hot for this material. In the movie Peter O'Toole and Katharine Hepburn gave Henry and Eleanor enough actorly relish to smother the uncooked hot dog underneath. But Goldman's Oscar-winning screenplay, closely hewing to his stage version, is so relentlessly quippy, every line sounds like a "ta-da!" exit line.

"What shall we hang — the holly or each other?" goes one line, famously if not cleverly. Or this one: "I'm vilifying you, for God's sake! Pay attention!" Goldman has a million of 'em, and the deliberate anachronisms don't bring us closer to these people. They're tiringly modish. The original 1966 Broadway audiences were right about this play. They stayed away.

So, despite all that: Many fine and intelligent theater people return to "Winter." Director Bowling has a formidable and wry Henry in David Parkes, who fared so well in TimeLine's AWAKE AND SING! and the more recent HANNAH AND MARTIN. He's youngish for the role, but well worth having around. Ann Wakefield swans her way through the role of Eleanor; to each encounter she and Parkes bring shared expressions of cats having recently dined out on canaries.

As the boys, Jeff Schmitt (John), John Luzar (Geoffrey) and especially Stephen Rader (a powerfully edgy Richard) impart a sense that something dramatically viable is going on. The same goes for Corryn Cummins as Henry's mistress, and as Philip Capet, Derek Gaspar.

A word about the stage fog, or as it's billed here, the "theatrical haze": Superb. A subtle, steady degree of the stuff floats through the theater, shrouding the proceedings in a historical mist. Bowling, his cast and his haze hold up their ends of the theatrical bargain. If you like the play, you'll enjoy this close-quarters, intimately scaled rendition.