Springwood at Hampstead Theatre: Robert Lindsay fails to lift this above humdrum

Robert Lindsay (Franklin) and company in Springwood - (Manuel Harlan)

Contemporary parallels are hammered home in Richard Nelson’s laboriously low-key drama about George VI’s meeting with Franklin Roosevelt at the president’s titular home in 1939. This was the awkward start of the fraught “special relationship”, necessitated by imminent war.

Then as now the US was isolationist regarding conflict in Europe. The British royal family was at a low ebb due to an embarrassing brother - the abdicated Edward VIII, married to a glam American divorcee and pally with Hitler.