William Gaminara's Three Lions fancifully portrays a real-life meeting of David Beckham, Prince William and Prime Minister David Cameron as the trio plotted England's bid to host the 2018 FIFA World Cup. A hit at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2013, the three-hander will play at London's St. James Theatre from March 24 (press night March 26) to May 2, 2015, producers have announced.
Dugald Bruce-Lockhart, Tom Davey and Séan Browne will reprise their Fringe roles as the Prime Minister, the Duke of Cambridge and the soccer star respectively. The three men met in a Zurich hotel in 2010 as England pursued its bid to host the quadrennial world soccer tournament, which it eventually lost to Russia.
"Obvious baloney," wrote Dominic Cavendish in his review in The Telegraph, "albeit peppered with verifiable factoids and fictions with the whiff of truth, the show has fun at the expense of those who can easily afford to take the hit."
Directed by Philip Wilson, the play imagines what happened when the trio met to try to bring "the beautiful game" home to the land where the modern sport originated. Naturally, in Gaminara's telling, things go terribly wrong, with missed planes, mistaken identities and misunderstandings.
David Cameron is turning up on stage rather frequently. Queen Elizabeth II meets with him--at the end of a long line of Prime Ministers--in Peter Morgan's The Audience, which is coming to Broadway in February with Helen Mirren reprising her royal role from last year's London production.
