Rhoda Feng
A production starring and codirected by Kenneth Branagh is thick with Neolithic-fur costumes, but thin on poetic feeling.
Kenneth Branagh as King Lear and cast in King Lear. Courtesy the Shed. Photo: Marc J. Franklin.
King Lear, by William Shakespeare, directed by Rob Ashford, Kenneth Branagh, and Lucy Skilbeck, the Shed, 545 West Thirtieth Street, New York City, through December 15, 2024
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Every generation gets the King Lear it deserves. Kenneth Branagh, who stars in a precipitate production that recently opened at the Shed, has given us an Ozempic-thin rendition of Shakespeare’s sprawling tragedy, one that privileges aerodynamic efficiency over depth. At the heart of this staging—directed by Branagh, Rob Ashford, and Lucy Skilbeck—is the strikingly hale actor, who struggles to embody “a very foolish fond old man, Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less.” In a recent interview, Branagh said that “the starting point for this new version was to have an emotional immediacy, to have youth and the impatience of youth at the center of things.” He could have been describing the buzzy new Broadway run of Romeo + Juliet, which boasts a clubby aesthetic and features a constellation of spirited stars. To underscore youth in Lear, though, is to look through the wrong end of the telescope. Its last lines, as spoken by Edgar, are a paean to “the oldest,” who “hath borne most.”
The current show, presented by the Shed, KBTC, and Fiery Angel, transports us to a Neolithic Britain sparsely populated by fur-clad characters wielding spears. Designed by Jon Bausor, the set features massive slabs of stone that link up in a semicircle and calve apart, while a circular screen (or is it a lidless eye?) hovers above the stage, displaying swirling galaxies, star systems, and planets. Ironically for a play presided over by a vaguely celestial donut, the script’s commerce with the supernatural is downplayed: in his fury, Lear does not call upon “Hecate and the night” or invoke “the operation of the orbs.” The Game of Thrones–like costumes may be period-appropriate but are something of a liability: on the day I was in the audience, the actors’ fur coats seemed to occasionally muffle their microphones, resulting in uneven sound quality. So much for Dolby Atmos’s immersive audio technology.
Kenneth Branagh as King Lear (center) and cast in King Lear. Courtesy the Shed. Photo: Marc J. Franklin.
The greatest handicap, however, is not the youth-centric vision or the spotty sound but the cuts to the text. A director who makes drastic reductions to a Shakespeare play should be prepared to compensate for the elisions through gestural or subverbal means. Unfortunately, that never happens in this production, which is reduced to two intermission-less, complexity-killing hours. The opening scene bypasses the original prologue—which helpfully adumbrates many of the play’s central themes—and leaps directly to Lear commanding his three daughters to take turns professing their love for him. Regan’s (Saffron Coomber) overture is reduced by half, rendering her protestations of adoration less fulsome, more Cordelia-like in their brevity. Gone too are the youngest daughter’s asides: in the original, Cordelia ruminates that “I am sure my love’s more ponderous than my tongue.” Absent such internal quibbles, here she verges on mere tactlessness. Any sympathy one may feel for Lear’s favored child is bullied into us by prior acquaintance with the story—not by Jessica Revell’s by-the-book performance. Omissions accrue apace. Where lines are not redacted, they are, in many cases, reordered, misappropriated by different speakers, or unwisely edited so they are leached of Shakespeare’s unusual imagery. Thus—in a subplot about a nobleman in Lear’s court and his two sons, Edgar and the bastard Edmund—instead of lamenting that Edmund “did bewray [Edgar’s] practice,” the Earl of Gloucester (Joseph Kloska) tonelessly utters, “He did expose the evil.” The result is a kind of poetic vitiligo.
Joseph Kloska as Gloucester and Kenneth Branagh as King Lear in King Lear. Courtesy the Shed. Photo: Marc J. Franklin.
A treasonous letter, allegedly written by Edgar (Doug Colling), in which he plots to overthrow his father, is read silently rather than aloud, depriving the audience of a greater sense of Edmund’s villainy. The “bastard” (Dylan Corbett-Bader) is more of a brute than an Iago-like schemer; he doesn’t offer his father the chance to obtain “auricular assurance” of Edgar’s disloyalty and is overly hasty in assenting to Gloucester’s negative impression of his brother. Lear’s eldest daughter, Goneril (Deborah Alli), and his second, Regan, are even less realized and fatally fungible in their lust for Edmund.
Caleb Obediah as Albany, Dylan Corbett-Bader as Edmund, Saffron Coomber as Regan, Deborah Alli as Goneril, and Mara Allen as Curan in King Lear. Courtesy the Shed. Photo: Marc J. Franklin.
With other productions of Lear, it has often crossed my mind that the tragedy of the tale is raveled up in the notion that one’s children are biological prostheses of oneself. When Lear deputizes Regan and Goneril as his “guardians” and “depositaries,” he scarcely expects them to defy his requests for superfluities. Whether out of benignant paternalism or not-so-benign blindness, he anticipates that they will gladly countenance all his desires, no matter how reasonable. What accounts for the harshness of his subsequent pronouncements—Lear calls upon Nature to dry up Goneril’s “organs of increase” and “into her womb convey sterility”—has partly to do with the terrible realization that his daughters have their own spheres of existence. The interpretation only tenuously applies to this British import.
Saffron Coomber as Regan and Deborah Alli as Goneril in King Lear. Courtesy the Shed. Photo: Marc J. Franklin.
Throughout, Branagh and his codirectors have prioritized action over interiority, and the pacing intensifies the feeling of hollowness at the show’s core. When Branagh’s Lear curses Regan and Goneril for having the temerity to ask him to reduce his retinue by fifty men, then seventy-five men, his feelings come not from the marrow of his bones but from pique. “Reason not the need,” the king chastises his daughters, yet his need, especially in the context of this austere production (Lear’s train of rowdy men is as notional as the play’s deluges and “hurricanoes”), comes across more as greed. The scene on the stormy heath—which ought to be a showcase for Lear’s headlong descent into lunacy—fails to strike the right note of pathos. A platform at the center of the stage tilts up at an acute angle for Lear’s meltdown in the maelstrom (the same platform is later used for the Dover cliff episode), but rather than evoking an “extreme verge,” the awkwardly inclined surface recalls a utilitarian loading dock. Equally prosaic, this Lear never calls on thunderbolts to “singe my white head,” but does suffer from some ill-timed aneurysms.
Kenneth Branagh as King Lear and Jessica Revell as Cordelia in King Lear. Courtesy the Shed. Photo: Marc J. Franklin.
An excellent comedic actor, Branagh is fitfully compelling in his declamations. A lighthearted tone too often prevails where gravity should; the moment when Lear meets a raving Poor Tom and asks him, “Didst thou give all to thy daughters?” should not elicit a big laugh from the audience. On more than one occasion, Branagh’s Lear is fogged by a forgetfulness redolent of Lockhart, the milk-livered professor the actor played in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Even in his final moments, as he cradles Cordelia’s lifeless body, his presentation feels frustratingly recitational, a mere quotation of more lived-in performances. To quote a line originally spoken by Regan and excised from this mutilated play, this Lear “hath ever but slenderly known himself.”
Rhoda Feng is a freelance writer based in Washington, DC.