Dec 27, 2009

The Lion in Winter | Themes

Dysfunctional Family
The central thematic focus of The Lion in Winter is on the interpersonal dynamics of members of a dysfunctional family. Goldman’s play is essentially a story about dysfunctional family writ large. Although the members of the family are kings, queens, and princes, their complex and troubled emotional attachments to one another are represented as an amplified version of the same kinds of problems people experience in modern families. As is often the case with twenty-first-century families, the Plantagenet family in The Lion in Winter...