The New Yorker:

In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, the actor, writer, and director ushered in a Golden Era of Shakespeare plays on film the likes of which we haven’t seen since.

By Helen Shaw

So—a few weeks ago, I saw Kenneth Branagh in “King Lear” at the Shed. Maybe you did, too? It’s been a while, but I’ve been hesitating to write: I’m still processing. Branagh is certainly meant to be the draw at the Off Broadway megatheatre, even more than Shakespeare. He not only stars as Lear but produced the show (through the Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company) and co-directed it (with the Tony Award-winning Rob Ashford and Lucy Skilbeck, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art’s director of actor training). The program cover features a tawny-haired Branagh in a huge, shaggy sheepskin cloak, posing hard in “sexy Viking” mode.

The tragedy, when performed in full, can run nearly four hours. Here it has been chopped to a hectic, highlights-only hundred and twenty minutes, and populated with an ensemble of recent graduates from rada. (Branagh was rada’s president for nine years; he stepped down in February.) Though the prehistoric set by Jon Bausor looks expensive—a movable Stonehenge circles the actors—the show exudes a certain student-theatre atmosphere, in that the casting disregards age altogether. Old Gloucester and his son, Edgar, look like brothers, and Lear, a man described as “fourscore and upward,” is being played by the sixty-four-year-old Branagh, who has been styled to look a buff forty-two.

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