6 / 10
It’s a bit like seeing a 19th century actor manager taking to the stage. There are some magnetic moments – most notably with Jessica Revell who doubles both as Cordelia and The Fool – but Branagh seems reluctant to drop his guard, to expose himself to frailty or feeling. Even when he is battling the elements, he still seems to be in control. He holds the role but never fully seems to inhabit it.
2 / 10
It’s perhaps Shakespeare’s most harrowing tragedy: an epic vortex of familial trauma, dementia, atrocity and war. Kenneth Branagh’s production – in which he also stars – fillets and compresses the play into just two interval-free hours. Yet it feels interminable. Confused in concept and clumsy in execution, it manages to be at once overblown and insubstantial. It is crammed with florid gesture and self-conscious declaiming, and offers scarcely a single moment of emotional truth.
Kenneth Branagh returns to the West End to direct and play the title role in William Shakespeare’s KING LEAR, for 50 performances only. Completing the cast is a company of RADA graduates.
Alarm bells ring when a director stars in the play they are also directing. Even if that director is Sir Kenneth Branagh. Nine times out of ten the production falls flat and the audience are left wondering if ego is to blame. Branagh’s hotly anticipated stab at King Lear is, sadly, no exception.
Images have been released from inside the rehearsal room for The Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company’s King Lear. Check out the photos here.
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