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Kenneth Branagh Is A Royal Pain In King Lear
November 15, 2024, 12:37.52 am ET

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Photo: Marc J Franklin

By Brian Scott Lipton

Once more unto the breach my friends! I know the quote is from Shakespeare’s “Henry V,” but it’s the way I feel every time I step into another star-driven production of the Bard’s “King Lear.” Having seen more than half a dozen of these outings in the past 20 years, I always enter the next one hoping to find some new insight or hidden nugget of psychological knowledge to justify another go-round.

Well, the biggest discovery of the new production at The Shed, starring the famed British thespian Kenneth Branagh as the troubled monarch, is that the play can be done in two hours without an intermission, losing just a little of its nuance by its cutting. (Admittedly, though, at any length, the work can be confusing to those who have never seen the play, and the here-and-there trims only exacerbate that problem).

Otherwise, we have a fairly solid if unsurprising rendering of the play, under the co-direction of Branagh, Rob Ashford and Lucy Skilbeck, that yields no revelations, despite the heavy lifting done by Branagh, complemented by a capable supporting cast made up of students trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts.

Admittedly, we’re not sure what to expect at first. The Griffin Theatre’s ceiling is dominated by what appears to be a giant eyeball (a metaphor if you already know the work), which will later telegraph the seasons and the weather. Branagh then appears on the stage, dressed in drab brown (as will everyone else) on an equally drab set of metallic-seeming slabs (the ugly set and costumes are credited to Jon Bauson), surrounded by what looks like a group of tribal warriors. Will this be “Lear” or “Braveheart”? (Spoiler: It will be “Lear.”)

As might be expected, Branagh huffs and puffs mightily as the egotistical Lear, who is willing to retire and divide his kingdom, but demands heaps of high praise from his daughters before doing so. His oldest two children, the scheming Goneril (a fairly bland Deborah Ali) and the fiery Regan (an excellent Saffron Coomber) easily comply, while his youngest and dearest, the too-proud Cordelia (a steely Jessica Revell, who later doubles spectacularly as Lear’s wiser-than-she-looks Fool), refuses to pay such homage and quickly flees to France with her betrothed (Stefan Brennan-Healy).

After being rejected by both daughters at their homes (lending to more outrage from Branagh) – they are decidedly “ungrateful children” -- Lear suddenly and inexplicably goes mad. Sadly, Branagh often overacts in these key scenes, sometimes screaming his lines like he is playing Wembley Stadium and not inside an intimate theater. As a result, we don’t always feel as bad for Lear as we should.

Luckily, Branagh brilliantly regains our sympathy at the play’s end, when he has (briefly) recovered both his mind and the long-absent Cordelia, who returns from France trying to save her father and his kingdom. Their scenes together are rather heart-breaking, lending the play some much-needed poignancy.

Meanwhile, the paradox of “Lear” is that it’s the star-driven play where the star is often offstage. Even in this shortened version, there’s plenty of time to tackle the work’s too many subplots, many of them including the power-hungry Edmund (a fierce Dylan Corbett-Baker), the, angry illegitimate son of the kindly, naïve Duke of Gloucester (an appealing if too young Joseph Kloska), who makes everyone believes his noble brother Edgar (an impressive Doug Colling) is a villain, romances both Goneril and Regan for his own ends, and conspires with many to dethrone Lear for good.

Especially in this version, I wonder why the play wasn’t just called “Edmund.” Perhaps, that is my greatest discovery!

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