Eleanor Of Aquitaine: By the Wrath of God, Queen of England

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By 1551, the palace buildings, then known as `the mansion`, were reported to have been decayed `for many years past`. The actor will portray Becket - once the monarch's closest friend and political ally - in a new adaptation by Frederic Raphael of Jean Anouilh's play, Becket.

speaks of her intention and reflects generally on her life, without giving too much away, but hinting at great turbulence and tragedies. RAYMOND is sympathetic - overly so, for he clearly finds his niece very alluring, and ELEANOR is playing up to this.This conversation continues as they wrestle in an urgent embrace, which RAYMOND ends by pulling away. On the other hand Shakespeare in Love was fantastic, pure entertainment and so believable, but Elizabeth was disappointing for me. And if any academic is sniffy about that, there is always Shakespeare, who certainly wrote 'faction'.

When their sons grew to maturity and Henry would not delegate power to them in the territories he had assigned them, they grew angry and resentful, and Eleanor – like Matilda of Flanders in a similar situation - took their part. For her, the love they bore each other came before all else, and ultimately it was to endure through the most terrible circumstances and privations. After the uprising was quelled, in February 1554, Elizabeth was arrested and committed to the Tower of London, where, for three months, she lived in daily fear of being executed, as her cousin Lady Jane Grey had been. Eleanor of Aquitaine has far outsold my expectations, and I suspect that there are many people who brought the book on the strength of her reputation alone.A remarkable portrait of Eleanor as the subject of a thousand conversations, this book gives us the queen who haunted the listeners of troubadour songs, shone in the biographies of famous knights, and burned from the acid pens of her enemies. It was a stage play set at a time of dramatic tension within the Angevin family, a chance to explore relationships in depth. Earlier twentieth-century historians found it hard to be objective about Eleanor, and some even drew historical conclusions from the debunked romantic legends.

Caird's production will include two choirboys from Westminister Abbey who will sing songs written by John Cameron.The Literary Review said: 'Her biography reads like a medieval romance, a marvellous intermingling of fact with legend. In 1125, he was made Abbot of St Gildas-de-Rhuys in his native Brittany, and gave the Paraclete to Heloise and her sister nuns.