When Kenneth Branagh strode onto the stage of Wyndham’s Theatre on 21 October 2023, dressed in animal skins and wielding a dagger tucked into his belt, he was not merely taking on Shakespeare’s most demanding role. He was completing a personal trinity. Having played Hamlet (in his Oscar-nominated 1996 film) and Macbeth (in a celebrated 2014 immersive production), Lear represented the final peak of the great Shakespearean tragic roles. The question that hung over the London run, and now hangs over the production’s transfer to The Shed’s Griffin Theatre in New York this autumn, is whether this Branagh Lear will be remembered as a triumphant summit or a noble misstep.
The numbers tell part of the story. Fifty performances at Wyndham’s, a strict limit, followed by a further fifty at The Shed from 26 October to 15 December 2024. This is not a production designed to linger. It hurtles past at a breakneck two hours without interval, a choice that divided critics but which Branagh has defended as essential to the play’s visceral impact. The London run sold briskly despite ticket prices reaching £275 for the best stalls seats, a figure that prompted one reviewer to note they could have attended the RSC twice in the best seats for the same price.
A Neolithic Vision
Branagh’s directorial concept locates the play in a prehistoric Britain that owes more to Game of Thrones than to any historical period. Jon Bausor’s set design surrounds the action with Stonehenge-like standing stones, above which hangs a vast eye-like sphere with an oculus – part divine surveillance, part theatrical metaphor. Paul Keogan’s lighting and Ben and Max Ringham’s sound design, with its tribal drum rhythms and elemental thumping, create an atmosphere that is undeniably powerful, even if The Artsdesk’s Mert Dilek compared the cumulative effect to “a Disney stage version of Game of Thrones”.
The aesthetic choices are deliberate and provocative. Nina Dunn’s projections of planetary movement and ocean waves wash across the backdrop, while the cast moves through a landscape of sticks, stones and spears. It is a world stripped of crown and ermine, where power is communicated through physicality rather than regalia. The Guardian’s Arifa Akbar noted that Branagh “flips from warm father at the start, sitting amicably downstage in wait for his daughters to flatter him, but shows a loud tyrant’s whimsy as he strips Cordelia of her inheritance.”
The RADA Experiment
Perhaps the most significant aspect of this production is its casting. Branagh assembled an entire company of RADA graduates, many of them recent alumni making their West End debuts. This was not merely a practical decision but a statement of intent. As Niamh Dowling, RADA’s principal, observed: “King Lear is an exceptional opportunity for RADA graduates, many of whom graduated very recently, to take part in a production of one of Shakespeare’s most impactful plays.”
The young company brings an energy that is palpable. Corey Mylchreest, still basking in the glow of his turn as young George III in Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, delivers a swaggering, predatory Edmund that steals scenes from his elders. Deborah Alli’s alpha-predator Goneril and Melanie-Joyce Bermudez’s Regan, in her professional debut, complete a trio of villains who give the production much of its bite. Jessica Revell, doubling as Cordelia and the Fool, creates one of the production’s most affecting relationships – a “wonderful, childlike affinity” with Branagh’s Lear that reviewers consistently praised.
Yet the casting also raised eyebrows. At sixty-three, Branagh is considerably younger than recent Lears – Ian McKellen was seventy-eight when he played the role in 2017, Glenda Jackson eighty in 2016. The Evening Standard’s Nick Curtis noted the “skewed logic” of setting the play in 800 BCE, where “you’d probably be dead by thirty-three,” making Branagh’s Lear essentially ancient. “Every time Lear declares himself ancient or near death,” Curtis wrote, “you think: ‘What, this well-maintained millionaire with the bouffant hair and the luxurious beard?'”
Critical Reckoning
The London reviews were sharply divided. The Guardian found it “fast and feverish” but “rather flat, and perhaps unwilling to plumb this play’s tragic depths.” BroadwayWorld was less diplomatic, warning that “alarm bells ring when a director stars in the play they are also directing” and suggesting that “ego is to blame.” The Independent acknowledged the “cinematic, pared-down feel” while noting that the production “lacks both grandeur and pathos until its final third.”
More generous critics found much to admire. The Evening Standard praised the production’s “radical, youthful” energy and acknowledged that “only when his Lear descends into a desolate and helpless state of dementia does he really tug at the soul.” The production’s final third, with Branagh stripped and smeared in a loincloth “like a biblical martyr,” delivered the emotional devastation the earlier scenes had only promised. Derek Jacobi, writing in the programme, placed Branagh’s attempt in historical context: “When you’re a young classical actor, you go through the Hamlet hoop. If your Hamlet is anywhere near all right, then you’re admitted to the classical club. Towards the end of your career, you’ve got to go through the Lear hoop to confirm they were right to let you in.”
The New York Question
The transfer to The Shed represents a different kind of challenge. The American run, which coincides with the 2024 presidential election, carries political overtones that Branagh has not shied away from. The parallels between Lear’s self-destructive narcissism and contemporary politics are hardly subtle, and the production’s American incarnation features enhanced sound design in Dolby Atmos, designed specifically for The Shed’s Griffin Theatre.
The Shed’s artistic director Alex Poots has spoken of the production’s “transcendent power,” and the transatlantic journey underlines the universal appeal of Shakespeare’s tragedy. But American critics may prove even less forgiving of Branagh’s directorial choices than their London counterparts. The New Times, reviewing the London run, found it “short” and “shallow,” a verdict that suggests the production’s greatest weakness may be its relationship with its own material.
What Lear Reveals
Branagh’s King Lear, ultimately, is a production about ambition – artistic ambition, personal ambition, the ambition of a man who has spent four decades at the summit of British theatre attempting something genuinely new. The decision to cut the play to two hours without interval is bold, even radical. The choice to cast entirely from RADA’s recent graduates is generous, even if it carries the faint whiff of old-school-tie loyalty. The decision to direct himself, a practice that had drawn increasing criticism after his 2015-16 West End season at the Garrick, was perhaps the riskiest choice of all.
The verdict from the i newspaper’s Fiona Mountford was damning: “Branagh’s unwise tactic of self-direction had been playing to diminishing returns for years now.” Yet the same critic acknowledged that Branagh “is one of the finest actors this country has produced in the past half-century,” and noted that his subsequent return to the RSC – not directing himself, but working with Richard Eyre on The Tempest – suggested the Lear reviews had, perhaps, hit home.
After the Storm
The trajectory from King Lear to The Tempest tells its own story. After thirty years away from the RSC, Branagh returned to Stratford in 2026 as Prospero, under Eyre’s direction, in what critics have called a “commanding homecoming.” The i’s Mountford described it as a “hugely welcome sea change,” noting that “this more restrained version of Branagh” was precisely what audiences had been waiting for. He will follow The Tempest with The Cherry Orchard at the Swan Theatre, directed by Tamara Harvey – again, not directing himself.
There is a lesson here, perhaps, about the difference between the actor Branagh and the director Branagh. As an actor, he remains formidable – his verse-speaking “as clear and comprehensible as ever,” his physical commitment total. As a director, his instinct for compression and pace can feel like a diminishment of Shakespeare’s complexity, a reduction of the play’s “deep, meditative qualities on the nature of being, ageing and questions of the soul.”
King Lear at Wyndham’s was a bold, flawed, occasionally magnificent production that announced its ambitions with every drumbeat and standing stone. Its New York incarnation offers a second chance – not to prove the London critics wrong, but to discover whether this pared-down, fast-paced Lear has something urgent to say to an audience grappling with its own questions about power, ageing, and the consequences of vanity. The actor who once said he wanted to “complete the set” of Shakespeare’s great tragedies has done so. Whether the set is complete in the way he imagined remains an open question.
For now, the storm rages on – first across the Atlantic, and then, perhaps, into a quieter reckoning with what Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy truly demands of those who dare to perform it. The Othello at Theatre Royal Haymarket and Ian McKellen’s forthcoming Falstaff in Player Kings remind us that London’s Shakespeare season never sleeps – but few productions have provoked as much debate about the relationship between actor, director, and text as Branagh’s Lear.
