Powerful moments in Branagh’s performance but there’s some unmet potential

King Lear is a mammoth role and a mammoth play. There’s a reason countless renowned actors have taken up the mantle to varied acclaim and this time it’s the turn of Shakespeare-legend-cum-GSCE-English-icon-cum-knight-of-the-realm-cum-Poirot to give us his take. He’s an astoundingly good performer, but the show falls flat.

Sir Kenneth Branagh gives us a younger, more charismatic Lear and it mostly works. Very few actors know their way as well around Shakespearean verse, and what some may call showboating I would call a master juicing out every moment in the text. Particularly moving—and impressive—are the moments he switches on a dime, plunged into a fit of madness, of anger, of forgetting. There’s a powerful tenderness in his grief and the relationship he shares with Lear’s youngest daughter, Cordelia (a competent, energised performance from Jessica Revell), and the choice to double up Revell as the Fool is a fine one which allows for plumbing of deeper depths.

The show is a momentum-fuelled two hours which sometimes helps but often feels less like speed and more like haste. The actors do well in the circumstances and there are plenty of solid supporting performances. Corey Mylchreest is particularly enjoyable as the villainous Edmund, possessing an almost comic insouciance to the fate of his family members, and Eleanor de Rohan’s Kent is strong and believable when without the disguise. There are moments of great work elsewhere but these are mostly marred by the play’s pace and cuts.

Branagh’s arching decision is to place us in neolithic England, Stonehengian slabs surrounding the playing space, watched over by a large eye used as a backdrop for Nina Dunn’s projections of the sky and the weather. The setting works—it’s useful to pick a time when the characters might truly believe in Gods who kill “for their sport”—and the contrast between this primitive time and Shakespeare’s poeticism reads more interesting than ill-fitting. There are also some effective fight scenes, though they border on cringe when not perfectly executed and one does have to slightly forgive any actor tasked with earnestly crying, “I am slain.”

It could be Branagh’s folly is deciding to direct as well as star. Under a different director, there might be more time to meditate on the themes and events as they unfold, more time to establish and develop the arcs of these pruned characters, more space for the heft of Branagh’s skill to land, and more weight in the tragedy. The scene where Gloucester’s eyes are gouged out should perhaps raise more disgust and upset than stifled laughter. There is a chance here for a stronger message to reveal itself from the text: a purposefully bleak and existential Lear (“nothing can come of nothing”) leaning into the nihilism, or a piece about generational responsibility and climate change. Instead, the bleakness is an accident and, most damningly of all, underwhelming.

There are some five star moments here, most from Branagh, and the production could warrant a star more. But with his name, at a West End theatre, with tickets reaching upwards of £200, an audience needs more. It’s no easy thing to carry the burden of expectation but one must ask whether, on this occasion, he might not be “more sinned against than sinning.”