“Fame,” says Borges, who somehow seems to have managed to see Sir Kenneth’s New York production of King Lear, “is a form of incomprehension.” I’ve rarely seen a famous actor so unconnected to the other players than in this production. See better, Lear! There are other people on stage who can help you!
Branagh’s essentially solo performance had a few interesting moments, though most of them were too histrionic for my taste. His variations on the five “nevers” over Cordelia’s dead body were technically interesting, and they reminded me a bit of his performance of Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech at the Park Avenue Armory in 2014. He played the king’s madness as a loss of language, especially in the “Sa sa sa” nonsense syllables he speaks while running away from Cordelia’s men. But too many of the most powerful lines – the rage against the storm, the curse on Goneril, the “great stage of fools” – were simply too hammed up, too much played over the heads of his fellow actors toward the back row where I was sitting. The conceit of the casting appears to have been Sir Kenneth plus a fresh crop of RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts) grads. (Branagh is a RADA alum.) But those actors couldn’t reach him, or he didn’t allow himself to be reached.
I was happy to experience the space – the new-ish Shed at the northern end of the HIgh Line near all the fancy new shops at Hudson Yards. Hovering above the stage was a massive donut-shaped fixture, with a cloudy sky projected onto it and a black hole at its core – not subtle, but visually arresting. The actors ran up and down the aisles, which I admit I always enjoy. It’s good to be sharing space! There was some complicated, and probably expensive, business with a diagonal piece of the stage that angled up to reveal the hovel beneath it – but the production didn’t do much to make the storm visceral in any way.
The cast that Branagh mostly ignored was, alas, not all that strong. Dylan Corbett-Bader’s Edmund did very little with one of the best roles in Shakespeare, and Doug Colling’s Edgar wasn’t much better. The daughters were better than the sons and sons-in-law. I’m coming around to thinking that Goneril is one of the most compelling roles in the play, and Deborah Alli did a solid job, especially when canoodling with Edmund. The best acting of the night came from Jessica Revell, who played both Cordelia and the Fool. As Cordelia she did a nice job sticking it to her narcissistic old man in the opening scene – perhaps there’s something in the world right now that makes me want to see a young woman stand up to a cranky old man? – and her Fool was lively, musical, and came closer than anyone else on stage to getting Branagh to pay attention. “Take heed, sirrah,” the King intoned as the Fool teased, “the whip” (1.4). For a moment it was as if Lear realized there were other people who mattered in his kingdom!
I’ve seen a lot of Lears over the years, including a lot of what I think of as “big man” productions, with star actors such as Ian McKellan, Derek Jacobi, Stacy Keach, Glenda Jackson, and Anthony Sher. Some of these productions were quite good, though usually not as consistently powerful as experimental versions like Colombari’s fantastic ten-actors-playing-the-King production this past summer, or the Chinese opera one-man show by Wu Hsing-Kuo. I remain concinved that the storm scenes at the play’s center are perhaps English literature’s most painful evocations of what it’s like to live in a hostile environment – a question that I fear will be increasingly on our minds as the Anthropocene plays itself into the future. But not every production can be a great one, I suppose!
Very expensive tickets still available through December 15th!