Word: eleanor
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Land and power. But is that all? "You think I'm motivated by a love of real estate?" Queen Eleanor demands. All this verbal carnage must have deeper roots. Like light glinting off the edge of a steel knife, appearances in The Lion in Winter are blinding. The viciousness and deceit, the shell of anger and the hollowness of despair are masks the royal family wear to cloak the more profound hurt of rejection. If they cannot have love, Henry, Eleanor and their three squabbling sons will have hatred--not merely hatred, but complete and utter decimation of their victims...
...center of the play is the duo of King Henry and Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, whose love/hate relationship fuels the dramatic action. Henry keeps Eleanor locked up during most of the year, but at Christmas-time he lets her out, and that's when the warring begins. Thomas Champion and Laura Bartell are well-matched as the estranged couple, who enjoy picnicking on each other when they're not feeding on themselves. Champion carries off the complex part of Henry--torn between his lusts of the moment and his fierce passion for immortality--with an enviable ease. His inflections...
Bartell, by contrast, has a tendency to rely overly on her technique, to think her part rather than feel it. During Eleanor's more controlled moments, she seems to be measuring the beats between words, savoring her lines purely as poetry rather than as expressions of character. Still, when Bartell lets go, as she does at the height of her confrontations with Henry, she is stunning. Her range grandly encompasses comic high-spiritedness and tragic disillusionment, and when she tells Henry she still adores him, every word wrenched out of her as though by a rack, her body, face...
Henry and Eleanor's sons may not exactly be lovable, but they're far from dull. Daniel Sherman plays John, Henry's favorite, very broadly, with an almost farcical glee. As "the family nothing," nicknamed a "walking pustule" by his brother Richard, Sherman gets to deliver such prize lines as "You turd." and "You're a stinker and you stink." In contrast to Sherman's comic posturing, Eric Luftman acts Richard Lionheart, Eleanor's darling, with straight-faced sobriety. Whether stiffly demanding his rights or reviling the rest of the family, he is a model of sullen, subdued rage...
Under Channick's direction, The Lion in Winter neatly negotiates the emotional currents which propel the tortured Plantagenet family. A few times, only a few, Channick and cast falter: Eleanor's exclamation that Geoffrey has loved her all along comes out of nowhere, and Richard's homosexuality is discovered too suddenly, without sufficient preparation. By and large, however, the production zigzags its way excitingly forward, interrupted only by a series of excessively noisy and prolonged set changes between scenes...