“It feels like a trial run and that Branagh’s Lear is still to come. It’s unlikely to happen, given his established working practices, but working with an outside director (or co-director) would be no bad thing.”
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“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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"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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“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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“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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“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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“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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"Confused in concept and clumsy in execution, it manages to be at once overblown and insubstantial. It is crammed with florid gesture and self-conscious declaiming, and offers scarcely a single moment of emotional truth. "
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