Kenneth Branagh’s “King Lear,” which opened Thursday night at the Shed, is a tragedy that doesn’t seem to know why it’s so tragic. The production’s fleet and feathery interpretation of how one man’s decline rains down misfortune on everyone around him undercuts the gravity of the classic, demoting it into a mere trifle.
The play, as many may recall from high school English classes, opens with Lear (Branagh) offering to split his kingdom among his three daughters according to who will flatter him the most. While his two older daughters, Goneril (Deborah Alli) and Regan (Saffron Coomber), comply, his favorite, Cordelia (Jessica Revell), refuses. Lear casts her off with nothing to her name.
But the king, accompanied by his jester (also Revell) and a loyal disciple in disguise (Eleanor de Rohan), is eventually driven to madness as he receives what he sees as disloyal treatment at the hands of his sycophantic daughters. Meanwhile, Goneril and Regan scheme against each other for power and for the hand of Edmund (Dylan Corbett-Bader), a wily creep willing to betray his own family for his advancement. Perhaps needless to say, most of these characters are dead by the final scene.
Each new production of “Lear” offers its own take on whether the play’s tragedy branches from the titular royal’s psychosis, dementia or a broken ego. In Branagh’s production — he is a co-director with Rob Ashford and Lucy Skillbeck — the king doesn’t come across as feeble in any way.
In fact, he’s fit as a fiddle. This Lear hops, crawls and gambols across the stage, even running off into the audience stands at the Griffin theater, meant to stand in for England in the New Stone Age. And despite Branagh’s cartoonish wails and babbles, this production never seems to believe Lear is ever truly ensnared by madness; there’s still a mild sense of cogency to Branagh’s performance throughout that colors him more as a wacky dad with hurt feelings than as a weakened ruler.
The show’s breakneck pacing, too, makes it sometimes read more like a light comedy. All considerable five acts are indelicately stuffed into a speedy two hours, without intermission. Though I don’t begrudge a shorter “Lear” — the lengthy play does often meander its way to its protagonist’s demise — this production bolts mercilessly through the dialogue with a cadence that doesn’t allow much space for nuanced emoting, silences or scene transitions to let the story’s depths sink in.
Branagh himself, usually armed with such a well-attuned ear, here seems to have lost his handle on the text’s lyricism and the naturalistic iambic gait of the speeches. Instead he recites his lines in a rushed singsong with some unnecessary frills: a few hammily rolled r’s, pretentiously clipped consonants and baffling acts of enunciation.
Most of the cast similarly feels tuned to the wrong frequency. Across this “Lear,” Revell’s fool is less a foil for him and more a cheeky mouthpiece for slights and riddles that could just as easily be excised. Corbett-Bader’s take on Edmund, usually an actor’s opportunity for some prime mustache twirling, is as more of a middling antagonist than Machiavellian fiend. And the deadly ambition of Goneril and Regan seems reduced to mere pettiness. (The production’s colorblind casting of Lear’s two reprehensible daughters as Black women, opposite a virtuous white Cordelia, is another unfortunate gaffe.)
The performance does well to convey a brooding atmosphere and a craggy, faraway landscape, thanks to Jon Bausor’s set design (a circular platform framed by moving stone monoliths) along with Ben and Max Ringham’s all-encompassing sound and Paul Keogan’s cinematic lighting. The floating disc that overhangs the stage, reflecting Hayden Planetarium-style projections of the cosmos, however, is an additional unseemly — and, frankly, distracting — artistic choice.
That all-seeing space-eye above Branagh’s Neolithic England seems to beg an existential question of this “Lear”: In a program note, Ashford writes, “Are we in the distant past or the distant future?” In aiming for timelessness, this “Lear” actually erases all sense of yesterday’s politics and any resemblance to the moment we’re in now. Our present — not just in America or England, where this play originated, but globally — doesn’t lack for petty machinations and raving leaders. And “King Lear” doesn’t lack for criticisms of power — those who seek it ravenously and those who wield it with reckless abandon. So it’s worth asking this production: Why play the fool when you could be king?
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