Kenneth Branagh will direct and play the title role for 50 performances only at Wyndham’s Theatre from 21 October.
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. For that, we’ll have to wait for Branagh’s near-inevitable, and welcome, film adaptation.
This is a bare-bones Lear – stripped of much of its weird cosmic poetry and shorn too of much of its complexity. The claustrophobic intimacy suits a reading that is fiercely attuned to the domestic and familial chaos at the play’s heart and the central crisis of Lear’s relationship with Jessica Revell’s single-minded Cordelia. It is less suited to the play’s restless sense of the epic and universal scope.
1754 | Broadway |
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1911 | Broadway |
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1930 | Broadway |
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1947 | Broadway |
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1950 | Broadway |
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1962 | Off-Broadway |
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1968 | Broadway |
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1973 | Off-Broadway |
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1978 | Off-Broadway |
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1982 | Off-Broadway |
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1990 | Off-Broadway |
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1996 | Off-Broadway |
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2004 | Broadway |
Lincoln Center Revival Broadway |
2006 | Off-Broadway |
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2007 | Off-Broadway |
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2011 | Off-Broadway |
Public Theater Production Off-Broadway |
2014 | Off-Broadway |
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2014 | Off-Broadway |
Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park Off-Broadway |
2016 | West End |
Old Vic Revival Production West End |
2018 | West End |
Chichester Festival Theatre West End Revival West End |
2019 | Broadway |
Broadway Revival Broadway |
2023 | West End |
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2024 | Off-Broadway |
Off-Broadway Production Off-Broadway |
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