THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
By William Shakespeare
Wyndham’s Theatre, Charing Cross Rd, London WC2H 0DA until 9 December 2023
Forget any ideas you have of Lear as a senile old duffer who lets his cantankerousness get the better of him. Sir Kenneth Branagh (63) who produces, directs, and stars in this with the all the brio of an old-fashioned Actor-Manager, gives us a Lear who is virile and hearty. No struggling to lift Cordelia here, this Lear works out, as if to say 80 is the new 50.
In Jon Bausor’s costumes (very Game of Thrones) he’s wrapped in furs and woollens, and with his neat beard and thick dusty blonde mane he’s more an invincible Viking warrior than a sad figure on the brink of mental and spiritual disintegration.
Purists will wail that he’s cut at least an hour from it, so it runs a frenetic 2 hours without an interval. Not a lover of this play I found this a merciful relief in many ways. The brutal pruning however has a downside, you can’t trim the layers of repetitive, (mostly) lame comedy, not to mention the longueurs THIS much without there being a cost, and sadly Branagh’s Lear doesn’t really survive this cosmetic surgery. Lost in the mad rush are the nuances of character and motivation in the supporting roles which great actors can always seek out and embellish, and the piece loses its deeper, meditative, quality. At times this resembles a film of a beloved novel where you come out and think ‘but they only did the plot?’.
Bausor’s design palette is all grays and browns, adorned with Neolithic slabs and a vast overhanging oculus bearing down on the action, which is well used by Nina Dunn’s video projections to conjure the ever-looming rain and storms. Ben and Max Ringham’s sound design is crucial to amping the tension. The production is heading to The Shed, New York’s trendiest new cultural institution in Hudson’s Yard, where these design elements will have more room to breathe. Here, it feels rather constrained on the Wyndham’s stage.
The cast, girded from the elements in animal skins and woollens like their king, sport the trendiest of braids and dreadlocks. Bearing wooden staffs, they dance to tribal drums in Aletta Collins’ impressive choreography.
As for Branagh, he delivers what you’d expect: crisp direction, polish in performance, crystal clarity in the verse speaking and a command of the stage which is perfect for the whimsical tyrant we meet early on. Later, he amps up the playfulness, but the vulnerability and desolation appear too late to make us really believe that this old man would have the rug pulled from under him, as he does.
The ensemble is packed with relative newcomers, which is great. Joseph Kloska brings a poignant gravitas to Gloucester and Corey Mylchreest is a dashing Edmund, his conniving son. Be wary of [spoiler] the eye gouging scene though, as here it is very explicit. You won’t be ordering jelly for dessert that night.
Jessica Revell is a sweet but actually sturdy Cordelia; she also doubles as The Fool, which doesn’t really work. As the older sisters Goneril and Regan, however, Deborah Alli and Melanie-Joyce Bermudez, despite their efforts, come across as cartoonish, which is mainly a function of the feverish rush here.
For newcomers this is a great introduction, and it certainly has its moments, but it doesn’t get near all the shades that this vast play has to offer.
