In 1939, the newspapers dubbed it the Hot Dog Summit. When King George VI and his wife Queen Elizabeth visited President Franklin Roosevelt, it was the first time a reigning monarch had visited a sitting president in the US. In the last year we’ve watched King Charles travel to the US to try and repair the tatters of Trump’s ties to NATO. By contrast this visit – in which King George sought the US’s support as World War II loomed – would prove to be the first step towards the Special Relationship which would underpin the formation of NATO a decade later.
Yet Richard Nelson’s play – which began as a 2009 radio drama and was then adapted into the film Hyde Park on Hudson in 2012 – deliberately plays down the political momentousness of King George’s trip to America. What unfolds instead is a gentle comedy of manners, in which alcohol, sex, and the question of how to eat a hot dog do as much to break down transatlantic tensions as any more conventional diplomacy.
Nelson, who also directs, emphasises the humanity of all the characters by making the actors themselves move round the furniture for each scene on Tom Piper’s stylish yet determinedly domestic set. We are at the Roosevelts’ country residence in Hyde Park, New York, where Franklin is living with his mistress, his wife Eleanor, and his formidable mother. One of the conversations revolves around the new loo seat that Roosevelt’s mother has bought for the royal bathroom. Franklin reveals that, ‘Mother’s planning on returning the seat on Monday…And I know what that plumber’s going to do too. He’s going to sell it as – “Here sat the King and Queen of England”, and charge twice the amount for it.’
Robert Lindsay delivers a superb performance as Roosevelt, for whom the skills of diplomacy at home seem to be as crucial as diplomacy on the world stage. His wife Eleanor (played with steely grace by Jemma Redgrave) is one of his greatest allies, yet lives separately in a lesbian collective with women who make furniture inspired by the socialist Arts and Crafts movement. She – like Roosevelt – is wary of his all-controlling mother (Eileen Nicholas), yet gets on perfectly well with his mistress Daisy, played elegantly and empathetically by Rachel Pickup.
Lindsay’s relaxed, intelligent charisma is coupled with a remarkable physical performance, which reveals the extent to which polio paralysed Roosevelt’s legs. In public Roosevelt carefully concealed his disability with the help of steel braces and canes, but here we see that he needs an aide simply to move from one chair to another. Yet he and the women around him treat this with an ease and an efficiency that simply make it another fact of life. What’s interesting is the way that it also breaks down any tension between himself and Andrew Havill’s shy, stuttering King George (Bertie), leading to a confessional late-night conversation in which Britain’s unwilling monarch lays bare all his insecurities.
Rebecca Night is excellent as the anxious, exasperated Elizabeth, constantly grappling with her fury that the abdication of George’s brother Edward VIII and his much more glamorous mistress, Wallis Simpson, has thrust her into the geopolitical spotlight. We see here a woman who is driven by the same sense of duty and high awareness of royal protocol that would inform her daughter’s reign. Every detail of this visit seems to represent an emotional crisis to her – are their American hosts lampooning them, is her husband being naïve, and what will it symbolise when they eat those damn hot dogs? The repeated refrain, “the walls are very thin here”, becomes an underlying joke about how exposed everyone feels in this situation.
It’s entirely typical of Nelson’s script that the most dramatic scene here – which cuts through the formalities, and who knows (?), might even have provided the necessary breakthrough for the Special Relationship – happens offstage. What we see instead is the way the different characters negotiate the layers of ensuing embarrassment. It’s a masterclass of humorous restraint and dignity which marks such a seismic contrast with today’s crass, steamrolling presidential style, it makes you want to weep. While you wouldn’t necessarily want to return to the inhibitions and insecurities of that encounter almost a century ago, it certainly makes you wonder how the world might be today if we had a president with even half of Roosevelt’s grace and gravitas in the White House.
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