Information about the play:

Long before the term "dysfunctional" was commonly applied to families, James Goldman gave the world a glimpse of this age-old phenomenon by creating for the stage the members of England's original Plantagenet family: King Henry II, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and their sons. (After a particularly traumatic family incident in the play, Queen Eleanor quips: Well, what family doesn't have its ups and downs?) Although best known for this play, The Lion In Winter, and the screenplay for the resultant movie, Goldman was a prolific writer who based many of his novels, plays, and screenplays on history, a subject he dearly loved.

"I read about the things they did, I studied them and then imagined what they felt and thought and said and wanted from their lives. What they were really like, of course, no one will ever know," wrote James Goldman in his preface to The Lion In Winter. In 1980 he wrote, "The truth of things is always underneath. It has to be imagined."

Audience members mustn't be misled into thinking that The Lion In Winteris a serious drama. "He understood what comedy was about", said his agent and wife of twenty-seven years, Barbara Goldman, "The Lion In Winter could have been a tradgedy as easily as a comedy. And it has to do with his point of view of the world. He viewed himself as a comedic writer. I think his sense of humour was everything about him."

Goldman wrote every day, seven days a week. "He did not write on a computer; he would onlywrite using a typewriter, you know, the kind with the golf ball," Mrs Goldman attested. "Jim called his typewriter 'Big Jack' in honour of his favourite golfer, Jack Nicklaus."

Hollywood has transformed many theatre scripts into huge film successes, among those plays, it remains a classic of modern theatre as well. Goldman wrote that "The Lion In Winter was more than reprieved by the movie. It was transformed into a theatre work that has been performed all over the world."