DeLearium: A Critical Review of Kenneth Branagh’s ‘King Lear’
On Tuesday night, I attended a performance of “King Lear” directed by and starring renowned Shakespearean actor Kenneth Branagh at The Shed, an opulent venue in downtown Manhattan.
I will begin with the production’s strengths, though, in truth, “anger hath a privilege.”
The technical elements were excellent. I had always imagined King Lear living in Shakespeare’s England, but the setting alleged by the play itself is an early pagan society. The actors exchanged their jerkins, codpieces and swords for furs, face paint and spears. The opening scene is a dramatic ritual, the cast crouch in a circle around Lear as he drags his spear in a circle, the speakers rumbling with low bass. An enormous starry eye hovers over the performance, and the rough stone walls expand and contract from scene to scene. A mechanically morphing ramp in the center of the stage provides a promontory for characters to deliver speeches from and a shelter for them to hide under. At some points, the entire theater became part of the set — actors thundered up and down the aisles in chase scenes, and Lear once disappeared in the shadows behind the back row, his disembodied babbling projecting across the audience.
Several casting decisions were surprising but tasteful. Kent, Curan, Oswald and the Fool were all played by women, a change which looked suspicious on the playbill, but which ultimately did not damage the integrity of the play or believability of its setting. The actors playing the faithful Earl of Gloucester (Joseph Kloska) and his heir Edgar (Doug Colling) really made the most of their lines and delivered some of the best moments of the play. Gloucester’s blinding and subsequent lament were chilling and Edgar’s final words were delivered with a rawness that cut through the fog machine’s clouds. Though their performances offered a shred of affective feasibility, other casting decisions felt less defensible.
Goneril (Deborah Alli) and Regan (Saffron Coomber) are meant to be two of the most wicked, treacherous villains of all time, but Alli and Coomber’s characterizations felt inept and facile. Alli recited her lines without acting them and Coomber overcorrected in the other direction — flinching, gasping and casting dramatic looks in every direction, even in scenes where she was an extra. Scene One is a particularly egregious example. The actresses delivered all their praises to the king in full earnest, like loving daughters would. There’s no hollowness or irony, no self-serving manipulation in their words. They praised Lear with wide smiles as from a teleprompter, hugged him and then left. I have no idea what the actresses thought happened in that scene, but the veiled venom of the text was simply not communicated.
Some of the insincerity was due to the way particular scenes were set. The convivial banter between the King and Fool in Act One would have been better served in a raucous beer hall, or a faux formal setting. Instead, the two of them stood alone on a blank set, speed-reading at each other and cavorting about. The jokes were hollow, and the audience sat stony-faced through the Fool’s irreverent barbs. The missing humor was not even replaced by the Fool’s prophetic brilliance or compassionate loyalty, both of which were also absent.
Under normal circumstances, these hiccups could be forgiven. Unfortunately, the play suffered from a much more egregious failing, one that painted its shortcomings as characteristic rather than mere missteps: its pacing.
“King Lear” usually runs between three and four hours, but Branagh’s arrangement took less than two. The truncated runtime necessitated alterations to the dialogue, skipped some trivial exchanges and rushed through every scene like it was the 4:18 p.m. Heichi Kedushah minyan. The lines were delivered so fast that at some points I couldn’t follow what was happening. In sprinting on and off stage and rapping their lines to get through the plot, the actors could not be bothered to convey the emotional and existential depth of the play. Watching one of the greatest tragedies of all time unfold, I felt nothing. The first two acts felt like someone had bullet-pointed the information they had to get through to make the play make sense and then delivered it point by point, like an infographic summary. At the end of the day, that is mostly what this felt like — a summary of the play’s plot, rather than a performance of the play itself.
Branagh’s Lear, though his diction is precise and elegant, is young, hearty, active and eager. These are attributes that do not match the aged, credulous Lear of the text. It’s hard to believe that he is either old or mad — he has places to be! Lear is invulnerable, flippant, emotionally opaque. He is not a believable or sympathetic character, because the requisite drama and character construction would just take too long. Branagh got through the labyrinthine plot in under two hours with no emotional payoff to show for it. The need for speed neuters even his impressive ability, though he is one of the most famous Shakespeareans alive. Edmund (Dylan Corbett-Bader) clearly has some acting chops, but instead of a seditious and clever villain orchestrating the puppets of power from behind a veil, the speedrun narrative presents him as a two-timing playboy and bad older brother. A video recording set to double speed loses its gravity. Its frequency grows squeaky and emotional pauses shrink to blips. It is hard to take it seriously when it's packaged as something to get through, and Edmund’s character is no different.
Lastly and most importantly, I cannot forgive Branagh’s treatment of Act Five, Scene Three. The play’s final scene is a heartrending condemnation of Lear’s self-delusion. Lear never accepts that his beloved eldest daughter Cordelia is actually dead. He tries to procure a mirror or a feather to prove she’s still breathing, growing increasingly desperate to maintain his delusion. He strains to hear her, evoking his desire to hear her praise him at the beginning of the play. In both cases he hears “nothing.” His last words are: “Look on her, look, her lips, // Look there, look there!” He convinces himself that she is still talking, though she is very clearly dead. His blindness to Cordelia’s love and Regan/Goneril’s treachery carries through his last moments, as Lear is unable to see that his mistakes have killed the only daughter who truly loved him.
In Scene One, the loyal Earl of Kent had adjured him to “see better, Lear!” hoping that Lear might still realize the truth of his and Cordelia’s honesty and loyalty. But by this scene, at the end of Lear’s life, Kent despairs of ever convincing him, “Vex not his ghost. O, let him pass!” Kent knows now that the old king will never accept his loss or his culpability in bringing about her death. Lear dies in denial, alone, with no legacy, no redemption, trying to convince himself (as he does the whole play) that he is contented and surrounded by loved ones when he is very much alone. The scene is a gut punch, concentrating all of Lear’s erratic behavior into one telling moment, the philosophical climax of the play.
And Branagh’s performance just … skips through it? In Branagh’s version, a sprightly Lear cuddles Cordelia’s dead body, mournfully whispers in her ear, has a dramatic heart attack and then Edgar wraps up. It is quick and perfunctory. I don’t know how to justify his treatment of this scene other than a pure misunderstanding of Lear’s character and its place in the play. The tragedy is not just “everyone’s dead.” It’s a crushing meditation on the truths King Lear can’t admit. Branagh’s brisk storytelling actually obfuscates the plot by implying the wrong things; his direction garbles the tragedy of Lear’s character arc and appears to entirely misunderstand the final scene.
Edgar’s final words, the final words in the play, are so chilling precisely because of Lear’s delusion. “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.” Edgar reflects on the tragedies of the last five acts, concluding that Cordelia was right all along: we should all say what's in our hearts, not what we think we are supposed to.
What Edgar evidently fails to realize is that Cordelia’s honesty in Scene One not only failed to avert tragedy, but actually initiated it! The audience knows that Edgar should know better, that Edgar should realize that truth is not enough to triumph over subjective intuition, that human fallibility is a constant that cannot be brushed aside by mere honesty. Cordelia was honest, but Lear’s vanity, madness and need for respect rendered her honesty moot. The tragedy is compounded by the fact that Edgar learns precisely nothing from all the losses he has suffered.
But the tragedy for me, as a viewer, is that it seems Branagh learned nothing from these tragedies either. This is a performance of “King Lear” that fails to portray Lear as the inevitable, foolish old man that he is or cement his mad denial in his final moments. By failing to show that the tragedy has meant nothing, the performance fails to mean anything.
Branagh’s portrayal of “King Lear” diminishes everything that made the play great, instead rendering an emotionally and literarily dead version of the scene in order to save two minutes of runtime at the cost of its resonance and messaging. Such is the tragedy of Branagh’s production — speeding through and dumbing down a masterpiece.
If I had Branagh’s ear I would advise him to heed Lear’s repetitious report: “Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again.”
Photo Caption: Branagh as Lear, five feet from the stage
Photo Credit: Nadav Heller
