Joanna Lumley and Robert Lindsay will star in the West End premiere of the 1966 Broadway play The Lion in Winter. The Lion in Winter was famously made into a film starring Katharine Hepburn and Peter O’Toole. It was revived on Broadway in 1999 in a production starring Laurence Fishburne as Henry and Stockard Channing as Eleanor.
Lumley plays the 12th-century queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of Lindsay’s king Henry II, who has had her imprisoned for years. 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?