Kenneth Branagh will direct and play the title role for 50 performances only at Wyndham’s Theatre from 21 October.
This King Lear feels like a curio, one that starts to imagine a different kind of way of presenting this time-honoured story of ageing and decline, without quite offering a complete reading. It feels like a first draft, polished to spearhead visual brightness, but not sharpened to a point. For that, we’ll have to wait for Branagh’s near-inevitable, and welcome, film adaptation.
The production feels like an accomplished rhetorical exercise that doesn’t run deep, when this, of all plays, needs to rattle the soul. The litmus test of any “Lear” is whether you emerge from the theater moist-eyed, and my cheeks were dry throughout.
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