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).

Kenneth Branagh, seen here with his cast, directs and stars in “King Lear” at the Shed.Photograph by Marc J. Franklin / The Shed

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.

In Branagh’s hands, “Much Ado” was joyful and accessible and intoxicatingly romantic—I think it’s the best film yet made of any Shakespeare comedy. Many performances are career peaks: Thompson is luminous; Branagh plays Benedick with exquisite finesse, a sly operator who secretly wants to get caught. Amid the loveliness, though, you can see the beginnings of what would be Branagh’s downfall with this kind of material—a penchant for casting big box-office names, whether they could handle the verse or not. (Keanu, bless him, was a nay.)

“Othello,” 1995

It’s also worth remembering what Branagh could do when he didn’t direct himself. As an actor, Branagh has a voice that’s high, excitable, and light, and his physicality possesses a tomcat sneakiness. In this superb, strangely overlooked “Othello,” directed by Oliver Parker, he is therefore perfectly cast as Iago to Laurence Fishburne’s Othello. Branagh’s lightning-quick Iago barely seems to plan; he needs only to react to events that unfold in accordance with his wickedness. In response, Parker slows the pacing elsewhere, so Othello, draped in heavy velvets, becomes stately and deliberative—he’s a ship trying to turn, ponderously, in bad weather.

Shakespeare writes fast parts and slow ones: Iago, like Benedick, is a trickster only half a step ahead of his own conceit. The excellence of Branagh’s Iago made me wonder what the actor could have done with the japester Fool rather than Lear. He’s a clown, not a tragedian. But, when you insist on directing every time, you do run the risk of casting the wrong guy.

“A Midwinter’s Tale,” 1995

One way to solve that issue: don’t cast yourself at all. It may not be his masterpiece, but I dearly love Branagh’s little-known black-and-white indie comedy, which stars Michael Maloney as Joe, an out-of-work actor putting together a D.I.Y. production of “Hamlet” in a run-down village church. (This is the movie of his I most frequently push on people.) The year before it came out, Branagh produced, directed, and starred in a Hollywood big-budget stinker, “Frankenstein.” The film may have been a critical flop, but the money from “Frankenstein” paid for “Midwinter,” and this swift, self-deprecatory farce describes both the siren call of Hollywood—which Joe, playing Hamlet with sweet dedication, manages to resist—and the egos and foibles of journeyman actors. We get a little sense of how Branagh may have won so many actors’ loyalty as a director: Joe’s fondness and patience for these goofballs seems infinite. The fellow playing Laertes (the hilarious Nicholas Farrell), for instance, asks Joe if he can rappel in for his big entrance. “I thought I could rip the shirt off and sort of abseil down from the organ. . . . They do some wonderful body oils now,” the actor tells Joe, earnestly, and the ensuing derring-do fight scene—minus the rappelling—does, indeed, glisten.

“Hamlet,” 1996

This was the paradigmatic project of Branagh’s career, which he wrote, starred in, and directed. (I say “wrote” advisedly: he got an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay by basically not cutting Shakespeare.) For good and ill, it seems to be the fruition of plans he had laid in other films. In the utterly bonkers climactic scene, for instance, Hamlet (Branagh) and Laertes (Maloney) fence to the death. Their desperate swordplay takes them racing up along a set of balconies above a tiled throne room. When Hamlet sees his evil uncle-king (Jacobi) below, he hurls his sword at him like a javelin, pinning the king to his throne. Our prince then swings down via chandelier, in an undershirt. He gets his rappelling in, after all.

Watching his “Hamlet” this time, I saw it as a conclusion of sorts: the end of a first, astonishing, youthful leap. (His touch for filmed Shakespeare would desert him in the two-thousands with rocky productions of “Love’s Labour’s Lost” and “As You Like It.”) The seventh feature film that Branagh directed in seven years, “Hamlet” is simultaneously a staggering achievement and a helping of delirious schmaltz, full of dashing brio and Branagh’s own scenery chewing. Julie Christie and Kate Winslet are wonderful as Gertrude and Ophelia, but his insistence on star casting finally gets the better of him. (Billy Crystal is the gravedigger.) As for Branagh, he gabbles several key speeches. Speed, of course, has always been his watchword, and we see here the seed of what will grow into that over-hasty “Lear.” In “Beginning,” he rhapsodizes about the “tremendous pace” of Jacobi’s “Hamlet,” which he saw with a girlfriend in Oxford in his teens. First impressions can be so dangerous. ♦