Kenneth Branagh’s King Lear at The Shed is a baffling misfire by one of the premier Shakespearean artists of our time. Branagh stars in this show, which he co-directed with Rob Ashford and Lucy Skilbeck, and the rest of its cast consists of recent graduates of RADA, the renowned acting school where Branagh trained and where he recently resigned as president after 9 years. The show was planned in conjunction with The Shed and finally opened in the West End last fall after a long pandemic delay. It appears to have been conceived as a parting gift to his former students, possibly in the hope that the publicity flood attending the star’s conquest of a pinnacle role would lift all career boats. That’s not how things worked out.
Radically cropped to an intermissionless 2 hours (King Lear is usually nearly twice that), this production careens forward at such a frantic pace that it skips past all explanatory context, eliminates crucial character and plot complexity and deepening contradiction, and leaves most of the play’s formidable depths unexplored. It is so starkly condensed that several people in the exiting crowd around me compared it to a CliffsNotes synopsis. I was thinking: a snappy Bowdlerization for the TikTok set.
In an interview in the program, 63-year-old Branagh describes his first impressions of the play as a clueless 17-year-old. Forging connections with the young was evidently a core value in this project, whose “driving idea,” he says, “was to be as urgent as possible. In our modern world, we are used to being very, very reactive.” Hence he decided to emphasize Lear’s “hideous rashness” in the opening scene (when the king impetuously disinherits Cordelia), to thrust the play forward from there in that same “reckless” vein, and to trim the text so severely that characters and audience alike are left with limited “time to think.”
This experiment is performed adeptly by a talented company that scurries tirelessly about without missing their marks and speaks at all times with crisp and fluid lucidity—also a signature strength of Branagh’s. The trouble is, no technical prowess can possibly paper over such a glaring reduction of Shakespeare’s story.
The preshow is the sole reflective section. As the audience settles in, they gaze on wondrously beautiful videos of the cosmos projected onto a giant, angled, hovering disk resembling an eye, or a lens, or a spaceship (set design by Jon Bausor). On the stage below is a round platform surrounded by large, rough, Stonehenge-like stones that move and sometimes gather into walls. At the center is a smoothly rectangular, horizontal slab that occasionally rises into a steep slope, suggesting a hill, a cliff, a parapet, or a spaceship ramp. The costumes and props are all plain, ancient and mundane—rough garments made of leather, skin and fur, unadorned daggers, stone-tipped spears. Like the hectic pacing, the futuristic touches to the stone-age style feel like a sop for the youngsters the show is supposedly aimed at. How many youngsters, I wondered, can afford The Shed’s $299 tickets?
So much is cut from the opening scene when Lear fatefully decides to divide his kingdom in 2 rather than 3 that all nuance in his daughters’ reactions is lost. Cordelia (Jessica Revell) speaks no asides here (“my love’s more ponderous than my tongue”) to color her refusal to play Lear’s embarrassing game of publicly declaring who loves him most. Nor do Regan (Saffron Coomber) or Goneril (Deborah Alli) utter any of their cutting perceptions afterward that give them dimensions other than pure malice (“’Tis the infirmity of his age; yet he hath ever but slenderly known himself”). Since Branagh himself is more whiney than angry in the scene, its zippy action reads merely as a petulant display of pique, barely even registering as a family quarrel because the relationships are so unclear.
The Gloucester sub-plot is still thinner. With the introductory sequence cut in which Gloucester (Joseph Kloska), Lear’s ally, speaks fondly to Kent of his bastard son Edmund (Dylan Corbett-Bader), our first impression of Edmund comes when he begins actively plotting against his father and legitimate brother Edgar (Doug Colling). This sets him up as a one-dimensional villain, and casts his father as a credulous fool for instantly believing his forged letter damning Edgar. That’s what comes of making things so perfunctory—the tale becomes a simplistic horror sketch rather than a probing tragedy of intimate betrayal. Corbett-Bader does have moments of impressive menace and could no doubt play a finely layered Edmund. Here he’s hamstrung by the constant imperative to rush and posture.
Comparable disappointments accompany every other major character and storytelling step. The Fool (played by Revell, the actor of Cordelia), for instance, is reduced to a transient jokester-flunky, vaguely affectionate but with no discernible special bond with Lear. Her presence is so nugatory and fleeting that her disappearance carries no weight. The same is true of the vexation Lear causes with his train of 100 knights. Here their disturbance is nothing but a petty claim since the whole scene is cut where they make boisterous asses of themselves and thereby justify Goneril and Regan’s objections to their presence. Because we never experience the trouble ourselves but only hear of it when the daughters complain, the episode recedes into the background—just one passing slight in a grim parade of undifferentiated villainies.
Strangest of all is Branagh’s curiously detached performance as Lear. Unlike any other Lear I’ve seen, he never lands on any particular attitude or emphasis for the role. To be sure, the decrepitude of age isn’t the thrust because he looks 47. Lear is supposed to be 80, and Branagh has a full head of dark hair and a toned upper body revealed in several shirtless scenes. What to make of this man’s claim that he’s ready to “crawl toward death”? Nor does he ever rise to any resounding evocations of rage, madness, imperiousness, or despair—all themes deeply ingrained in the play and reasons why it is so venerated. Perhaps feebleness is his chosen focus, I thought at one point, but even that impression didn’t last. The disorienting truth is that Branagh makes no strongly defining acting choice in a play that necessarily revolves around the title character’s catastrophic choices.
I find this King Lear truly mystifying. How to explain such a fizzle from this uniquely gifted and deservedly acclaimed artist, whose Shakespeare achievements include rich, smart and subtle films of Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Hamlet, and As You Like It? Here are two surmises. (1) Perhaps he was trying to stand back and de-center Lear in order to let his former students have the limelight. If so, the gambit backfired because a hazy Lear clouds everyone around him. (2) Perhaps Branagh discovered to his dismay that he couldn’t particularly connect with Lear. Or couldn’t yet. Maybe he’s still too young for it.
As it happens, I’ve seen a King Lear directed by Branagh before. Back in 1990, I found myself in Los Angeles when his staging of the play with his newly founded Renaissance Company opened at the Mark Taper Forum. I remember the production very well. Branagh was a 28-year-old wunderkind then, fresh from his Oscar for Henry V and newly married to Emma Thompson, who was featured in this production. She played the Fool opposite Richard Briers as Lear. Branagh played Edgar.
Briers’s king was a pompous ranter whose self-deprecating bombast came off as the flip side of loneliness. His Lear was deeply and intimately connected with Thompson’s Fool, whom she played as a disabled, possibly insane savant, chanting nearly as many lines as she spoke. The performance was a tour de force, with Thompson wearing whiteface and strapped into a cowled, tight green outfit that forced her to crouch and waddle like a duck. Her Fool was recklessly courageous in the face of Lear’s enemies, often punching out key words like “nothing” and “shadow” to drive home her oblique points (“Lear: Who is it that can tell me who I am? Fool: Lear’s shadow”). Their closeness was the main redemptive element in a production those thrust was the deterioration of human bonds. Branagh even rearranged text to highlight her Fool, ending the first act with the character’s parting words from later in the play (“We’ll go to supper in the morning./ And I’ll go to bed at noon”) as the audience watched her curl into a ball as if ready to die.
That was just the stunning halftime mark in a wholly absorbing 3 ½-hour show. Which only goes to show that there are indeed any number of dynamic, effective and illuminating ways to de-center Lear. One of them emerged long ago from the imagination of arguably our best Shakespearean, who has now inexplicably brought us an inert version at The Shed.
Photos: Johan Persson
By William Shakespeare
Directed by Rob Ashford, Kenneth Branagh, and Lucy Skilbeck
The Shed's Griffin Theater