Sir Kenneth Branagh’s bold new production asks you to laugh, cry—and act
Murder on the television, agony on the radio; lies and hatred on the internet, plus snuff videos that you click on before realising your mistake. The planet is a boiling cauldron in which you are the complacent frog. When the real world feels like a charnel house, why spend an evening and a chunk of cash watching bodies pile up on stage? And in “King Lear”, Shakespeare piles them high. “That’s but a trifle here,” a character says of another’s demise during the final die-in.
Here the power struggle that follows Lear’s division of his kingdom is less a clash of armies than a scrap for a bauble in the mud. Yet the absence of pomp also makes the family drama at the story’s heart seem movingly intimate and familiar. Captured by his foes, arms bound behind his back, Sir Kenneth’s Lear uses his beard to dry the tears of his beloved daughter Cordelia . Soon he heaves her corpse onto the stage, howling in grief; this time, nobody laughed.
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