Kenneth Branagh, who’s played so many of Shakespeare’s title characters, now brings along his King Lear. These days when the classics—Shakespeare’s and others—are presented, the purveyors are often doggedly concerned that they are, as the repeated phrase goes, “for our time.” Heaven help us that anyone in our day and age thinks King Lear is some musty old thing.
In a program note from Shed CEO Meredith “Max” Hodges, it’s observed that “the production invites you into the rugged word of Ancient Britain, while speaking with the urgency of our time.” Of the work directors Branagh, Rob Ashford, and Lucy Skilbeck fashion with the text, Shed artistic director Alex Poots, comments that this revival opens “a window into the creative process that connects Ancient Britain to 21st-century New York.” Director Skilbeck offers, “King Lear is as relevant as it was in 1606.”
Okay, Shed introers, your worried point is made. If nothing else, this King Lear is a doozy for our time in that it’s been shrunk from five acts to two intermissionless hours and therefore couldn’t be more wrought for a 21st-century in which audiences have gotten used to fare very often not exceeding 90 minutes.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
But—and here’s the 64-trillion-dollar-question—in the “for our time” designation, does this King Lear provide any more quality desires? This is always remembering (too many seem to have forgotten) that human nature hasn’t significantly changed during the endless millennia, and, more than anything else, Shakespeare understood human nature to a fare-thee-well-or-ill. Isn’t that the major defining aspect of anything and everything dubbed a “classic”?
Whether Branagh is absolutely for our time calls for discussion. He is, unquestionably, one of our finest Shakespeareans, not only as an actor but as a producer-director. Which means that eventually he’s obliged to show us his King Lear. At 63 and in fine shape, there has been talk of his being too young. But what does that mean? How old are daughters Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia? Are they in their forties, fifties? Can’t he be father to younger daughters, as they’re presented here. Can’t he simply have grown weary of a monarch’s duties?
Yes, Branagh is a highly acceptable Lear who, fearing he will go mad, slowly does. The editing he, Ashford, and Skilbeck have done, however, undercuts the extent of his madness. For instance, missing in the despairing heath scene is the mock trial Lear insists on holding, further demonstrating his mental disintegration.
It also needs to be noted that—on a Jon Basour set framed by large grey, stone-like walls and furnished with little else other than Nina Dunn’s projections of infinite skies—the three directors ask their troupe to speak the iambic pentameters as if they’re speaking Shakespeare. Needless to say, they are, but somehow something is lost: Shakespeare’s uncannily conversational poetry. The result is that this King Lear impresses more as melodrama than as plain old encompassing drama.
As a foremost Shakespeare salesman to our time, Branagh is a champion of new Shakespearean actors as well. To that goal, he’s heading a company of recent RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Acts) graduates. That’s an admirable, if not entirely welcome, gesture. He, Ashford, and Skilbeck have also decided to dismiss gender in a few roles, another admirable, if not entirely welcome, gesture.
The best of the relatively young cast is Jessica Revell, who prompts the thought that, as The Tempest declares, “our revels now are ended.” With her as The Fool, the revels are just beginning. With a mesmerizing twinkle in her eyes, she gets every laugh the Fool seeks when teasing the King. Not only that, but she’s doubles as Cordelia and is persuasive in the role, if not much more.
Of the rest of Branagh’s cast, Deborah Alli is a tough-as-nails Goneril, Doug Colling a flibbertigibbet Edgar, Dylan Corbett-Bader an imposing and furious Edmund, Joseph Kloska a befuddled and fiery Gloucester, and Chloe Fenwick-Brown an apparently female Oswald. Eleanor de Rohan fares less well, hardly her problem, as a supposedly still male Kent.
A final word about the costumes. Branagh and associates set the play in “Ancient Britain, during the Neolithic (New Stone Age) Period”—hence the grey Stone Age walls. Basour’s earth-tone costumes conjure the Neolithic to a fault. In one rage Lear chides his betraying daughters about what they “gorgeous wear’st.” There’s nothing gorgeous on the stage clothes-wise but enough on view production-wise to keep this King Lear fighting fit.
King Lear opened November 14, 2024, at The Shed and runs through December 15. Tickets and information: theshed.org
