Kenneth Branagh will direct and play the title role for 50 performances only at Wyndham’s Theatre from 21 October.
It’s perhaps Shakespeare’s most harrowing tragedy: an epic vortex of familial trauma, dementia, atrocity and war. Kenneth Branagh’s production – in which he also stars – fillets and compresses the play into just two interval-free hours. Yet it feels interminable. Confused in concept and clumsy in execution, it manages to be at once overblown and insubstantial. It is crammed with florid gesture and self-conscious declaiming, and offers scarcely a single moment of emotional truth.
Branagh’s vision is undeniably there, but the execution lacks directorial precision. Nobody doubts his capability as a performer or as a director (see his recent Oscar winning film Belfast). But doing both at the same time does the cast no favours.
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