When Richard Nelson's Springwood was announced last year, it arrived with an impressive pedigree: it was set to mark Stanley Tucci's directorial debut. Since then, Tucci has dropped out (starry scheduling conflicts!), with US playwright Nelson stepping into the director’s chair himself. It's hard not to wonder whether Tucci might have coaxed something more dynamic from the material.
This stage adaptation of Nelson’s film Hyde Park on Hudson dramatises the 1939 state visit to the United States, when King George VI and the future Queen Mother met President Franklin D Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt for the first time. Here, then, are the origins of the so-called ‘special relationship’. Hitler’s power is on the rise, and Britain is desperate for an ally. But before they can secure American support, they must first survive a country-house weekend, a public picnic and the thorny business of mastering beer etiquette and eating hot dogs with dignity.
So, there’s the initial question of whether opposites can actually attract. Yet as the President and the King spend more time together, they discover they have more in common than first appears. Robert Lindsay's Roosevelt is an easy-going, wise-cracking paternal figure, while Andrew Havill’s Bertie – as the king is known – is awkward, reserved and still finding his feet as monarch. They bond over whisky, conversations about women, stamp collecting and public perception, but also through their shared experiences of disability: Roosevelt's paralysis from polio and Bertie's speech impediment.
For a meeting whose consequences would reverberate around the world, Springwood is strikingly domestic in scale. Tom Piper's thrust staging transforms the Springwood estate into an intimate space, bringing us directly into drawing rooms and bedrooms where the king and queen feel utterly out of place. Nelson's script, however, leans too heavily on familiar national clichés: the British drink tea and rely on decorum, while the Americans are plain-speaking, easy-going free spirits.
Those cultural differences are most vividly embodied by the two women. Rebecca Night's Queen Elizabeth is in a near-constant state of anxiety, desperate to telephone home and speak to her daughters, while Jemma Redgrave's Eleanor Roosevelt is forthright and pragmatic, accepting her husband's affairs with the understanding that they have ‘an agreement’.
But these conflicts aren't enough to inject real dramatic momentum into Nelson's slow-moving production. Lengthy scene changes, with furniture laboriously moved on and off stage, bring the action to a halt, while the oddly episodic structure makes the king's three-day stay feel like an eternity. All of it could benefit from a bit of directorial zing.
Still, programming a play that interrogates the special relationship at a moment when tensions between the UK and US are once again in choppy waters feels apt. But if Springwood is anything to go by, diplomacy might be solved with a late-night debrief and a glass of whisky.
