King Lear at the Shed’s Griffin Theater

King Lear at the Shed’s Griffin Theater. Directed by Rob Ashford, Kenneth Branagh, and Lucy Skilbeck. October 26-December 15, 2024.

KP: One can learn beautiful and ennobling things from even the worst performance of Shakespeare. I have to start with that, because overall I think this was a very bad production. Usually when I critique a performance, it is for quite specific points of the production; here the problems are much deeper and more pervasive. But I should try to build them up from specific observations as they were revealed to the audience.

Focusing on the opening scene: the breakneck pace of this production was immediately apparent, excising individual lines to get the total performance down to 2 hours. The first scene jumps right to the Lear plot, skipping the exchange between Kent and Gloucester. This omission makes the play move along, but lessens the contrast between the two plots, and this then decreases the emotional impact of the play. A generally flat presentation of Lear (Kenneth Branagh) is also clear in this first scene – both from omitting lines and from how he delivers the lines he has. This is not a Lear who bellows and rages: from the start he appears small, frail, petty. Even in his (shortened) cursing of Cordelia, he seems only annoyed, not blasphemously enraged. This is the beginning of choices in this production that seem throughout to make the action more ordinary and plausible, but steadily erode how dramatic or tragic it is. To anticipate…