Review: King Lear Stars Kenneth Branagh as an Aging and Unwise Ruler

Donald Trump is back — and right on time, so is King Lear, Shakespeare’s tragedy of an elderly King whose foolish choices bring an end to peace. I thought I had had enough of this play back in 2014, the “year of Lear,” which saw three major productions in New York (the drama has since appeared on Broadway with Glenda Jackson and off-Broadway with Antony Sher). But a decade later, I’m more convinced than ever that King Lear is the great tragedy of our time, brimming with brilliant insight conveyed through stunning verse. That’s obvious even in ho-hum revivals like this one from London, which stars Kenneth Branagh in the title role.

The production (which is directed by Branagh, Rob Ashford, and Lucy Skilbeck) aims for historical authenticity by actually placing the mythic King in ancient Britain, where animal pelts and hair braids are all the rage (Jon Bausor designed the sexy premodern costumes and Wakana Yoshihara did the editorial-ready hair and makeup). It opens with Lear and his vassals performing a ritual dance (paganish choreography by Aletta Collins) within a megalithic stone circle (the rocky diorama of a set is also by Bausor). Then the king makes a fateful announcement.

He will divide his kingdom (here played by the Griffin Theater) among his three daughters, with Goneril (Deborah Alli) inheriting house right and Regan (Saffron Coomber) getting house left. The more opulent center section remains unassigned, betraying daddy’s favorite. Yet when Cordelia (Jessica Revell, whose does just fine double-cast in this role and the fool) declines to shower her father in praise as her sisters have done, Lear disinherits her and divides the rump of the audience between the other two, whom he is certain will tolerate his frequent visits with a retinue of 100 drunken knights. But he’s mistaken, and his lapse of judgment pushes him to the brink of madness, and Britain to civil war.

It’s easy to discern the surface relevance of a drama about an aging king with an unappealing brood, a man susceptible to flattery and prone to verbal digressions. And we can also recognize how so many members of America’s superannuated ruling class have gleaned the most superficial lesson of Lear by declining to ever retire. But Lear is not merely a cautionary tale for expiring tyrants. It’s a meditation on the slippery nature of power itself, a force that operates as much by faith and perception as it does by arms.

We can see this most clearly in the B-plot around Edmund (Dylan Corbett-Bader), the bastard son of Gloucester (Joseph Kloska, a neolithic daddy fitness influencer), who sees this chaos as a ladder to legitimacy and more. He schemes to sideline his brother, Edgar (Doug Colling), and dispatch his father while romancing both Regan and Goneril.

In previous productions I’ve found myself rooting for Edmund to dislodge this feckless highborn elite and restore order like Darius the Great or (for a usurper Shakespeare might appreciate) Henry Bolingbroke. This requires an uncommonly seductive actor in the role, however, and Corbett-Bader sadly isn’t it. His receding Edmund seems more like a lucky guy dealt a good hand, rather than a master illusionist actively manipulating the deck.

Branagh’s Lear is similarly rudderless, his full mane of strawberry-blond hair making us question why such a hale monarch would want to retire (Branagh is 63 — ancient for ancient Britain, but practically middle-aged by the standards of the 21st-century rich). His delivery is just as mellifluous as one might expect, with a lucidity and command of the verse shared by very few of his contemporaries. “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks,” he bellows — and we momentarily experience the warm satisfaction that all American audiences feel when encountering overwrought British performances. But it’s not enough to pave over the major potholes in this production, which seem to originate with the cut of the text.

As much as I hate to admit it, having suffered through so many soggy three-hour productions of Shakespeare, this intermission-free, two-hour Reader’s Digest version of Lear seems to leave a lot on the cutting room floor that might illuminate the motives of our characters and the trickle-down effect of their choices. Actors rush on and off the stage, shouting their clipped lines and waving spears, leaving very little room for reflection. And if anyone did stop to ponder, I’m sure I couldn’t see them.

Paul Keogan’s lighting is so dark I often had trouble discerning the face of the actor who was speaking. Was he attempting to convey a dark age lit only by the stars? Or (more practically) was he trying not to undermine Nina Dunn’s projections, which depict the galaxy on a celestial donut hovering over the stage? All that’s missing is the dulcet baritone of Neil deGrasse Tyson and we would have King Lear in the planetarium. Maybe they’re trying to say something about astrology and the cyclical nature of all things — that our fates are written in the stars. Or maybe it’s just pretty.

Aesthetically, King Lear is highly cohesive, even if the actual production feels thematically undernourished, deprived of a clear directorial perspective. But perhaps our three directors assumed that, times being what they are, audiences would bring their own thematic resonance with them.

Personally, I was most struck by Edgar’s final lines, which are not a consolidation of power à la Malcolm’s speech in Macbeth, but an overture to further chaos, with taboos shattered and the prospect for human flourishing (and the longevity that makes Branagh seem like a spring chicken) diminished:

“The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much nor live so long.”

If you think this is bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet.