“Branagh’s vision is undeniably there, but the execution lacks directorial precision. Nobody doubts his capability as a performer or as a director. But doing both at the same time does the cast no favours.”
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“This is an attractively, if unevenly, packaged version ‘King Lear’. A rigorous directorial hand would have been just the thing to help it find its feet – and to send those spears flying into the bull's-eye.”
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“It’s fine when Branagh is there to do the heavy lifting. But ‘Lear’ himself becomes less of a presence later on, and the show sags when its star is off stage. At two hours it’s by far the quickest ‘Lear’ I’ve ever seen, but it’s not radically abridged so much as briskly staged – there is still of a lot of Lear-free subplot to be negotiated in the second half.”
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“The mainly young and inexperienced cast surrounding Branagh are left beached by the approach. Their characters and lines are cut, and they race through their speeches, skating gamely along the surface but never penetrating the depths beneath.”
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"Peel away the brutal pruning of the text, and casting that is blind to age, ethnicity and gender, and this is a solidly old-fashioned staging. The verse-speaking is overly enunciated and emphatic"
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“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.”
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“The star can still seize us by the throat. The moment when, stripped to little more than a loincloth, he totters on the edge of the spiritual abyss gives us a glimpse of a broken soul. A disjointed evening begins to generate an authentic sense of the tragic.”
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“As a production it is packed with action and deft in its fight scenes, but remains rather flat, and perhaps unwilling to plumb this play’s tragic depths.”
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