Kenneth Branagh’s ‘King Lear’ at the Shed

There’s a difference in the way Americans do mediocre Shakespeare and the way Brits do it. Ours tends to be easier to recognize for what it is. American acting training is heterogenous and feelings-forward; we still put a lot of stock in dubious Strasbergian notions of authenticity, and we’re scared of things above, beyond, and fundamentally opposed to realism. We tend to deflate the cosmic into the casual, making word salad while we’re at it. For the Brits, there’s at least a base-level expectation of textual rigor. At the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art one summer, I spent three days sitting on the edge of my chair (we weren’t allowed to lean back) painstakingly reading Pericles aloud as a towering Liverpudlian director snapped at our cast after every phrase, “What does that mean?!” If anyone started their answer with, “Well, uh, basically —” she’d scream, “No!” and we’d start again. You don’t leave RADA not knowing what you’re saying or without an appreciation for the richness and versatility of Shakespearean language and a drive to make it sing.

But being able to speak Shakespeare, to utilize poetry and communicate meaning, will still only get you so far in bringing one of his vast, infinitely faceted plays to life. It will probably mean — as is the case with the King Lear now visiting the Shed, starring Kenneth Branagh and co-directed by Branagh, Rob Ashford, and Lucy Skilbeck — that you can tell a clear story with at least a superficial sense of urgency. It won’t mean that you’ve decided what that story, deep in its bloody viscera, is really about. Tellingly, in an interview with the Shed’s artistic director Alex Poots in which Poots asks Branagh to share his “overarching vision” for the play, Branagh responds by talking not about an idea but about an experience: “I first saw King Lear when I was 17 years old,” he says. “I was a bit intimidated going in, but I came away thinking … Well, first of all, there’s lots of incident, there’s lots of plot, there’s lots of story … Its size and its so-called importance fell away, but its urgent, familiar, recognizable story about human beings was what I carried away with me.”

I’m happy for 17-year-old Kenneth, and also that doesn’t answer the question. Branagh’s overarching vision seems to be textural rather than essential — “to be as urgent as possible.” He and his co-directors have sheared the behemoth down to two hours sans intermission, and the thing does move, but to what end? I once listened to a director describe the necessity for plays to proceed simultaneously along two axes: There’s the x-axis of forward motion, but there’s also the y-axis of depth. Get stuck doing only y and you’re wallowing. Ride only the x-axis and, eventually, all the sprinting entrances and exits and panting, gasping line deliveries in the world won’t save you. You’ll be running without carrying anything.

That’s the feeling for most of this Lear, where it’s not just the extreme text trims that create a sense of flattened character and circumstance but also, and more significantly, the one-dimensional hastiness of the direction. It’s not impossible for Lear’s two older daughters, Goneril (Deborah Alli) and Regan (Saffron Coomber), or for Edmund (Dylan Corbett-Bader) — the self-described bastard of Lear’s ally, Gloucester (Joseph Kloska), and most explicit villain of the play — to define themselves fully in fewer words. But all three of these crucial figures wind up feeling like outlines. They all speak their text well — everyone does — but beneath their performances and plenty of others, there’s an absence, an echoing space of unhad or at least unmanifested conversations. Do Lear’s daughters love him? What do they bring with them into the space when they gather along with the rest of their father’s court to witness the old king divesting his power and dividing up his kingdom? What have their lives been like? Their marriages? When their father, exceptionally hale and hearty in Branagh’s rendering, asks the dire question, the joke that’s not a joke — “Which of you shall we say doth love us most?” — are they shocked, prepared, cynical, hurt, furious? Here, they convey plot rather than complexity of soul. They say their lines crisply and get on with it.

Branagh, Ashford, and Skilbeck may think that they’ve sufficiently summoned King Lear’s prodigious existential scale by literally bringing the cosmos into the room. Aesthetically, the production is pitched somewhere between Vikings and The Dark Crystal, in a Neolithic Albion where everyone carries stone-tipped spears and wears a lot of fur, baggy linen, and cute leather boots and belts (pay no attention to the trendy buckles and rubber soles). Jon Bausor, who designed costumes and set, surrounds the stage with Stonehenge-like slabs and suspends an enormous, doughnut-shaped projection surface above it — a kind of looming God’s eye where, as the audience enters, galaxies and nebulae swirl murkily. As the play begins, Earth revolves into view, Death Star style, then we start to zoom toward landmasses, eventually zeroing in on ancient Britain. Considering that Branagh treasures his teenage memory of seeing Lear’s “so-called importance” stripped away, the portentousness feels counterintuitive, not to mention a bit silly. This is how a high-school student starts an essay on King Lear (or on anything, really): “Since the dawn of time, mankind has always …” It’s also much more cinematic than it is theatrical. The Branagh who directed Thor is present, but what of the Branagh who’s got something to say to us, as both director and actor, in this room right now, about King Lear?

As an actor, Branagh has always been one of the most fluent speakers of Shakespeare out there. You’re never lost when he’s talking, and he’s got a distinctive knack for making individual words sing — watch his face crinkle on the drawn-out long e’s in “pleased me”; feel his consonants buzz and twang in words as simple as “live” or “things.” Listen to his r’s just keep on rolling, all the way up to the end. Those r’s, though, are where technique — even Branagh’s — reaches its limits. Whose diction stays this grand, this ornamented, when they’ve been stripped of everything, perhaps even their sanity? When they’re wandering a desolate beach, barefoot and crowned with twigs, only to find their old friend with his eyes gouged out? Poetry has got to marry with circumstance, and the circumstances of Lear are monstrous. “The worst is not so long as we can say, ‘This is the worst,’” says Gloucester’s loyal son, Edgar (Doug Colling), in one of the play’s many lines that absolutely should hit like a cannonball to the chest but that here feel swept up in the action, lost in an overarching need to get on. Another is Lear’s devastating revelation on the heath, his mind breaking open to his own blindness, his lifelong misuse of power and neglect of others’ suffering: “O, I have ta’en / Too little care of this.” Branagh’s Lear, robust and active and frustratingly opaque all throughout his breakdown (it’s hard to believe he’s “old” or “mad”), hardly stops moving around the stage for this line, and its ending is garbled by Colling’s yawp as he leaps into sight disguised as the raving beggar Poor Tom. Branagh doesn’t sit with anything, nor let us receive the full force of its impact.

If there’s an actor in King Lear who’s attempting to go deep as he drives forward, it’s Kloska. His Gloucester, though conspicuously young — everyone’s young, even Branagh, whose not-skipping-leg-day 63 feels more like 49 — has both gravitas and conscience. He’s feeling what he’s saying and what’s said to him. His suffering is tangible. When, after hearing the lie that his beloved son Edgar wants him dead, he turns his brokenhearted gaze skyward and says, “These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us,” he brings Bausor’s hovering heavens-screen into really meaningful relief for the first time. “Loves cool,” he continues, managing to crack open a door to the play’s great, bleak, howling heart, “friendships fall off, brothers divide: in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked ’twixt son and father. We have seen the best of our time.”

That is King Lear. But Branagh, Ashford, and Skilbeck offer no consistent access to the play’s magnificent existential darkness. Even in his Lear’s final moments, Branagh, despite the God’s eye above him, chooses the literal over the cosmic. When he carries in his dead youngest daughter, Cordelia (Jessica Revell, who doubles as a much-cut, playful but insufficiently prophetic Fool), his howls of mourning feel strangely unwrenching, and his eventual death a downright misreading of the play. “Look there, look there!” Lear whispers over Cordelia’s body in an incredible echo of the warning given him by the loyal Kent (Eleanor de Rohan) back before it was all too late. “See better, Lear,” says Kent, and as the old king dies, cradling his dead child, he finally does see. It’s a mystical death, a moment of preternatural vision followed by a departure. “Look there!” he says, then joins Cordelia in the place we cannot see. But Branagh, who has seeded a couple of aneurysm-like attacks throughout his performance, plays the moment with crushing realism. He seizes up, gasps and grabs his head, thrashes, contorts, dies. Not only does such an interpretation fatally diminish the play’s scope, it also makes the moment about him, not about Cordelia, and not, even more crucially, about the invisible thing he’s exhorting us all to see. A King Lear without that invisible thing might have battles and betrayals, drums and trumpets, and get us back out on the street in a cool two hours, but it won’t be “the thing itself.” It will, in the end, come to nothing.

King Lear is at the Shed through December 15.