After eight years Kenneth Branagh makes a commendable return to the London stage and to Shakespeare, for just 50 performances of a cut-down, radically youthful King Lear.
His take on “the actor’s Everest” lacks both grandeur and pathos until its final third. The early scenes of vanity and fury fail fully to ignite, though his verse-speaking is as clear and comprehensible as ever. Only when his Lear descends into a desolate and helpless state of dementia does he really tug at the soul.
Branagh also directs and has located the play firmly in a harsh, neoleolithic Britain of furs, longstaffs and stone circles – very Game of Thrones. He’s cut it to two hours without an interval, keeping most of the big moments at the cost of complete dramatic coherence.
And he’s cast it entirely from RADA graduates, mostly recent ones. Good on him for giving young actors a break in the West End, though it’s a bit old-school-tie to only support those from his own top-rank alma mater.
There’s skewed logic to this lowering of the median age: in 800 BCE you’d probably be dead by 33. Branagh is 63, ergo, decrepit. But he looks every inch the polished international artmaker he now is: a man equally at home helming Marvel blockbusters, starring in and directing Poirot reboots, or eulogising his childhood in 2021 arthouse hit Belfast.
Every time Lear declares himself ancient or near death, you think: 'What, this well-maintained millionaire with the bouffant hair and the luxurious beard?'
To be fair, everyone in this kingdom has excellent hair, with a variety of braids, dreadlocks and shaved undercuts on show. But in true Monty Python fashion, Lear stays free of the dirt encrusting the rest of the rag-clad characters until his lowest moment, when he’s exposed, stripped and smeared in a loincloth, like a biblical martyr. His fretful delivery and silent howl in the last scene are truly moving.
Peel away the brutal pruning of the text, and casting that is blind to age, ethnicity and gender, and this is a solidly old-fashioned staging. The verse-speaking is overly enunciated and emphatic. The villains steal the show from the virtuous characters, particularly Corey Mylchreest’s swaggering Edmund (a far cry in confidence from his recent role as an anguished young George III in the Bridgerton spin-off Queen Charlotte) and Deborah Alli’s alpha-predator Goneril. Jon Bausor’s set, of a vast eye glaring down on a set of movable menhirs, dominates and sometimes dictates the action.
Branagh’s springiness needn’t be problematic. His idol Laurence Olivier first played Lear at 39; Michael Gambon at 41; Simon Russell Beale at 53 in 2014. What’s missing is a sense of conviction in the early stages of his performance that an external director might have identified and rectified. But relinquishing control, not being the brilliant one-man band, may be beyond our Ken. Pity.
