“Springwood”at Hampstead Theatre
Neil Dowden in North London
★★★☆☆
1 July 2026
A king visits a US president using soft power to advocate for British interests including defending Europe against tyranny. No, not Charles III’s recent encounter with Donald Trump, but George VI’s stay with Franklin Roosevelt in June 1939. This is the subject of American dramatist Richard Nelson’s new play Springwood, which he has already tackled in a 2009 radio drama and a screenplay for the 2012 film Hyde Park on Hudson. But this subtly understated piece about the origins of the special relationship – apparently forged over hot dogs and beer – has surely been revisited by Nelson to contrast it with the yawning chasm that now exists in the transatlantic alliance.
Jemma Redgrave and Rebecca Night.
Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.
The play is set over three days in the Roosevelts’ country home Springwood overlooking the Hudson River in upstate New York. Crowned only two years previously, George VI is the first reigning British monarch to visit the United States, so his trip accompanied by Queen Elizabeth is a big deal. Although an extension to their already arranged tour of Commonwealth Canada, the elephant in the room is the hope that America will become an ally of Britain in the expected war in Europe – which would start only a few months later.
But with two decades of isolationism since the end of the First World War and a Congress not keen to involve US citizens in another war, the sympathetic Roosevelt’s hands are tied. However, Nelson shows how the royal visit is used as a public relations exercise, helping to pave the way for an Anglo-American alliance. Though the US didn’t officially enter the war until after Pearl Harbor two and a half years later, it provided valuable assistance to the Allies long before that.
Much of Springwood revolves around a comic clash of cultures. The still inexperienced royal couple – George only became king of course because his elder brother abdicated to marry a twice-divorced American woman – are much more formal and reserved in their behaviour. Indeed the Queen suspects they are being made fun of with their bedroom pictures of the War of 1812 and a threatened picnic of hot dogs. Meanwhile, their more relaxed, older hosts Franklin, his wife Eleanor, and his mother try to make them feel at ease, and are allowed to call their guests Bertie and Elizabeth – but the Roosevelts’ unconventional domestic situation causes complications. Elizabeth is horrified to learn that Eleanor lives in another, nearby house with two female furniture-makers who “like women”; and Bertie stumbles upon Franklin in sexual congress with his assistant Daisy.
Yet, ironically, it is these intimate revelations that break the ice of diplomatic protocol, and ultimately turn the visit into a much warmer affair. In this character-driven drama, Nelson skilfully shows how a personal bond is formed between the two men in particular after exchanged confidences over late-night whiskey and cigarettes. The physical challenges both have faced – the wheelchair-bound Roosevelt’s polio and the King’s sometimes debilitating stammer – bring them closer together, with a knock-on effect for their respective nations.
Springwood is the fourth play by Nelson staged at Hampstead Theatre, including another Anglo-American drama Farewell to the Theatre about the pioneering playwright-director Harley Granville Barker’s time in the States during the Great War. It featured a couple of the cast in the current show, and was directed by Roger Michell, who later went on to film Hyde Park in Hudson. This show is directed with sensitivity by Nelson himself, with the stage extended so that the audience sits on three sides to boost intimacy, though at times it seems a little underpowered. Tom Piper’s simple but effective set moves the interior action between dining room and bedroom, while John Leonard’s sound design evokes the crowds and entertainment outside the house when the two couples go out to meet the public eye.
Robert Lindsay plays Franklin with quiet authority and avuncular charm, a calmness that belies his strained marriage and significant disability – it is a shock when we see him lifted up from his chair helplessly almost like a baby. Jemma Redgrave’s Eleanor also conveys a patrician hospitality with a sense of civic duty that even overcomes the humiliation of her private domestic “arrangement” being broken by her husband. With his stiff body language Andrew Havill endearingly expresses the pains Bertie takes to play the kingly role he was not raised for or truly desired. Rebecca Night shows how Elizabeth’s snobbish primness is gradually replaced by a gracious understanding of the situation. Rachel Pickup is the well-intentioned but awkwardly placed Daisy, and Eileen Nicholas is Roosevelt’s Mother, the actual owner and courteous hostess of Springwood who seems to have very little idea what is going on beneath the surface.
