Review: Kenneth Branagh’s Sped-Up ‘King Lear’ Is Full of Thrills

You will not be able to keep your eyes off the eye. Visitors to the thrilling, trimmed-down Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company production of King Lear (Griffin Theater, The Shed, to Dec. 15), starring an excellent Branagh in the title role, will be unable to remove their own gaze from the central symbol of Shakespeare’s play—poor Gloucester!—rendered here into its most significant design element.

Set designer Jon Bausor, who also designed the Ancient Britain costumes (think furry pelts and much shaggy fringing), has made the eye—with a hollowed-out area where the pupil should be—gaze down upon the characters.

At moments of high drama, red courses through it; at other times it roils with milky cloudiness. During the play’s famous storm, it too feels riven by the elements. This eye not only sees everything, but feels and judges it too. Around it are standing stones, which close in and retreat depending on when the action is inside (they group tightly together) or outside (they space out). A flat stage turns out to have hidden—very smartly executed—cantilevered powers.

King Lear typically runs to about three hours, but this wonderful production, first staged in London last year—directed by Rob Ashford, Branagh and Lucy Skilbeck—comes in at around two, with no intermission. You may know what has been excised—or have that feeling of, “Wait, we definitely spend more time on the blasted heath than this”—but the play does not suffer from it; and this excellent company of actors, led by Branagh, ably marshal and distill all of Lear’s melodrama and linguistic poetry. This production is, in the best possible way, Lear’s greatest hits.

Purists may disagree with that and gripe at some of the editing choices. But you can typically measure a play’s success by an audience’s reaction in the moment. Pin-drop quiet, tense, utterly agog: our audience for Branagh’s Lear was clearly digging the radical edit.

Branagh, with advice from various U.K. Shakespeare experts, pruned the play to this two-hour version. His Lear is Trumpian in his monotoned, bellicose self-regard, then vulnerable, flayed. He looks locked in his body, until he starts thrashing at thin air out of frustration with the mounting humiliations of scheming daughters Regan and Goneril (Saffron Coomber and Deborah Alli, both effectively slithering and hard-faced). Branagh has already played Hamlet and Macbeth—this Lear completes his Shakespearean tragic lead-character trifecta.

Jessica Revell plays both Fool and Cordelia—and only the program revealing that will make you notice, so different does Revell look in both, although the dual casting serves to focus how both characters speak truth to power, one patriarchal, the other monarchical. Kent (Eleanor de Rohan) swings niftily in and out of disguise, trying to surreptitiously defer and avert disasters all around.

Dylan Corbett-Bader is not only a leeringly vicious Edmund, but the speed of the show means he becomes a genuinely frightening one; the speeded-up Lear shows just how quickly power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. In that sense, this Lear speaks with extreme urgency—unintentionally, but it just does—to the state of America right now, not just in moral terms but in the accelerated nature of the present political circus.

Whatever, this is a spicily electrifying adaptation, with actors running in all directions across the stage and out into the aisles. Paul Keogan’s skilled lighting sharpens the urgency of the edited text—stark white spotlights illuminate the play’s most memorable tableaux, like Gloucester (Doug Colling) having his eyes plucked out (fair warning: as violent and visceral as the text relays), and then Lear cradling a dead Cordelia at the end, resonantly pondering why any living thing should have life and she not.

There are incidental problems an edited Lear brings: characters who hover anyway (Albany, Cornwall, Burgundy, France) become even more obtuse, even annoying. But Branagh’s well-judged red pen has ruthlessly honed Shakespeare’s disquisition on power, and the tragedy of familial betrayal, without losing any of the play’s texture, density, and impact.

Indeed, scaled back, this Lear may remind you of how much the play is about, how it weaves so many by-now well-known dramatic familiars we see in films and TV dramas together. Concentrating Lear into two propulsive hours makes you realize not just how many themes it encompasses, but how much it has bequeathed to works of art that have followed it—it’s a tree of dramatic leaves to endlessly pick from and play with. Branagh’s edit is not just a drama snack-filled rollercoaster, but a celebration of the power and influence of the play itself.