Review Roundup: Kenneth Branagh's KING LEAR Opens in the West End. What Did the Critics Think?

Kenneth Branagh returns to the West End to direct and play the title role in William Shakespeare’s KING LEAR, for 50 performances only. Completing the cast is a company of RADA graduates.

The show will run at The Shed in the Fall of 2024.

What did the critics think of Branagh's production and performance?

King Lear is at Wyndham’s Theatre until 9 December

Photo Credit: Johan Persson

Alexander Cohen, BroadwayWorld: 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.

Claire Alfree, The Telegraph: This is a bare-bones Lear – stripped of much of its weird cosmic poetry and shorn too of much of its complexity. The claustrophobic intimacy suits a reading that is fiercely attuned to the domestic and familial chaos at the play’s heart and the central crisis of Lear’s relationship with Jessica Revell’s single-minded Cordelia. It is less suited to the play’s restless sense of the epic and universal scope.

Sarah Crompton, WhatsOnStage: It’s a bit like seeing a 19th century actor manager taking to the stage. There are some magnetic moments – most notably with Jessica Revell who doubles both as Cordelia and The Fool – but Branagh seems reluctant to drop his guard, to expose himself to frailty or feeling. Even when he is battling the elements, he still seems to be in control. He holds the role but never fully seems to inhabit it.

Arifa Akbar, The Guardian: Staged at a hurtling two hours with no interval, it is almost cinematic in its action-packed speed, which on stage appears like haste. Actors barrel from one scene to another with too few pauses. This divests the play of its deep, meditative qualities on the nature of being, ageing and questions of the soul.

Clive Davis, The Times: If you had doubts about whether the actor-director has the gravitas to take on one of the great Shakespearean roles, you’d have them confirmed here. At 62, Branagh has entered bus pass territory, yet there is still a hint of the unruly colt to the king who announces his decision to divide his domain between his daughters. For all the solidity of his verse-speaking, it’s hard to believe that this glossy-haired patriarch is really on the verge of mental and spiritual disintegration.

Alice Saville, Independent: This King Lear feels like a curio, one that starts to imagine a different kind of way of presenting this time-honoured story of ageing and decline, without quite offering a complete reading. It feels like a first draft, polished to spearhead visual brightness, but not sharpened to a point. For that, we’ll have to wait for Branagh’s near-inevitable, and welcome, film adaptation.

Matt Wolf, New York Times: The production feels like an accomplished rhetorical exercise that doesn’t run deep, when this, of all plays, needs to rattle the soul. The litmus test of any “Lear” is whether you emerge from the theater moist-eyed, and my cheeks were dry throughout.

Sam Marlowe, The Stage: 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.

Mert Dilek, The Arts Desk: Branagh’s central performance is ultimately, and surprisingly, underwhelming in its psychologically discontinuous presentation of Lear. Like many in the cast, he either overaccentuates or underpitches his delivery, vacillating between extremes of emotion without fully inhabiting the part’s profound subtleties. Especially in the play’s first half, his oscillations between capricious, bombastic king and bruised father often feel abrupt and synthetic.

Average Rating: 51.1%