Remembering Kenneth Branagh’s Shakespearean Heyday (and Forgetting His Recent Lear)

So—a few weeks ago, I saw Kenneth Branagh in “King Lear” at the Shed. Maybe you did, too? It’s been a while, but I’ve been hesitating to write: I’m still processing. Branagh is certainly meant to be the draw at the Off Broadway megatheatre, even more than Shakespeare. He not only stars as Lear but produced the show (through the Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company) and co-directed it (with the Tony Award-winning Rob Ashford and Lucy Skilbeck, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art’s director of actor training). The program cover features a tawny-haired Branagh in a huge, shaggy sheepskin cloak, posing hard in “sexy Viking” mode.

The tragedy, when performed in full, can run nearly four hours. Here it has been chopped to a hectic, highlights-only hundred and twenty minutes, and populated with an ensemble of recent graduates from RADA. (Branagh was RADA’s president for nine years; he stepped down in February.) Though the prehistoric set by Jon Bausor looks expensive—a movable Stonehenge circles the actors—the show exudes a certain student-theatre atmosphere, in that the casting disregards age altogether. Old Gloucester and his son, Edgar, look like brothers, and Lear, a man described as “fourscore and upward,” is being played by the sixty-four-year-old Branagh, who has been styled to look a buff forty-two.

What really discombobulated me, though, was that Hot Lear does such a bad job with the verse. Branagh’s diction is as precise as ever, but his character’s big speeches are emotional blanks—loud and fast, and seemingly triggered at random. Yet there was a time, not all that long ago, when the name Kenneth Branagh was internationally synonymous with Shakespeare. He once directed and starred in movies—“Henry V,” from 1989, was the first—that heralded a Golden Era of Shakespeare on film. In London, Branagh and his company still produce Shakespeare: he was nominated for Olivier Awards for his “Winter’s Tale,” in 2016. But his filmmaking now leans toward lush nostalgia (the Oscar-winning “Belfast,” a movie inspired by his childhood) or cheeseball silliness (a series of Agatha Christie adaptations in which he plays a mustachioed Hercule Poirot).

Yet still, still, I cannot shake my memory of him as a wunderkind actor and director in the eighties and nineties. For me, and for others in my Gen X cadre, he provided a first exhilarating experience of the Bard; the idea that Branagh might have lost his touch for him feels profoundly destabilizing. After I saw “Lear,” I spent weeks going back through Branagh’s cinematic Shakespearean heyday: the good, the bad, the in-between. Could I work out where it all went wrong? At the very least, I found several things—and I say this self-soothingly—to recommend.

“Henry V,” 1989

I was a young teen when Branagh’s movie-directing début, “Henry V,” hit American theatres. I remember being keenly aware that Branagh was both starring as the youthful king and controlling the proceedings; to an adolescent, it was a heady combination. Branagh’s own youth added to the glamour. He shot the film at twenty-eight, and he was nominated for an Oscar for Best Director when he was twenty-nine. With zero experience in film direction, Branagh shot several indelible sequences, such as the one in which Henry staggers across the muddy Agincourt battlefield, hauling a page (a sweet-faced Christian Bale) to pile him among the dead.

The film is a rich tapestry of scenes in rainy, dark woods and golden interiors, like the warm castle parlor where Henry woos Katherine, the princess of France, played dazzlingly by Branagh’s then partner, Emma Thompson. The two would be hailed as another Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton: a gorgeous real-life pair playing a power couple onscreen. Branagh can be a bit hammy as Henry, but that’s kept in check in the banter with Thompson, and he serves his cast of virtuosos—including Michael Maloney, Derek Jacobi, and Judi Dench—beautifully. The director reserves his tenderest filmmaking for the late Michael Williams, Dench’s husband, who plays a common soldier doubting his master’s war; Branagh may be the only filmmaker who captured Williams’s capacity for soulful anguish.

Youth, velocity, charisma, and undeniable star power—the film itself became a rallying cry for a new crowd of Shakespeare movies, often cast with Hollywood’s young royalty and geared toward mainstream audiences. In its wake we had, among others, Mel Gibson in Franco Zeffirelli’s “Hamlet” (1991), Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes in Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet” (1996), and Ethan Hawke in Michael Almereyda’s slacker “Hamlet” (2000). By the time Gwyneth Paltrow starred in “Shakespeare in Love,” in 1999—and won an Oscar for her performance—moviegoers had basically had a decade’s training in verse drama. We haven’t seen anything like it since.

“Beginning,” 1989

So how did he do it? I found many answers in Branagh’s autobiography, published the same year that “Henry V” came out. He realizes that publishing an autobiography so young will lead to accusations of hubris, and it did; the British press would be scathing as Branagh’s fame grew. But he and his friend David Parfitt had launched the Renaissance Theatre Company, an actor-led ensemble, and he sold the book to help support it. The result is a breathless, galvanizing, often wry account of an energetic young actor’s life. As an introverted schoolboy in Reading, England—his family had moved there from Belfast—Branagh wrote to his actor heroes, combing through old theatre magazines and charting their rise from tiny parts at the Royal Shakespeare Company to later triumphs. He himself notably skipped that process of learning from small parts; he played Hamlet as a student at RADA, and he was already landing leading professional roles before graduating.

In 1984, five years before Branagh filmed his “Henry V,” he played Henry in a production by Adrian Noble for the Royal Shakespeare Company. Indeed, that became a pattern in his early work. He would appear in a Shakespeare play under a great actor-director—he starred in a touring 1988 Renaissance production of “Hamlet,” directed by Derek Jacobi, and an Italy-set staging of “Much Ado About Nothing,” directed by Judi Dench—and then he’d shoot a film of it himself. There’s a little bit about his relationship with Thompson in the book, but it’s described coolly; the heat is reserved for his sense of mission and his comradeship with other actors. Even at thirty-five years’ remove, the enthusiasm is contagious. For days after I read it, I kept trying to talk people into starting a theatre company.

“Much Ado About Nothing,” 1993

Branagh’s masterpiece is set at an Italian villa; he and Thompson play Benedick and Beatrice. It’s both good Shakespeare and good filmmaking. The movie starts at a drowsy hilltop picnic, which is interrupted when a prince (Denzel Washington, magnificent) and his military entourage—including Branagh and Keanu Reeves, as the duke’s bad-hearted brother—ride into view, galloping up the Tuscan road in thrilling slow motion. The picnickers come tumbling down the hillside to meet them, the women shrieking in delight. The soldiers tear off their blue-and-white uniforms and leap into an outdoor fountain to bathe; the camera dashes inside the villa to see the women throw their own white summer shifts in the air. Already, before the play starts, everyone is flinging themselves into love.