King Ken’s back
but he’s leaving Lear lovers short
King Lear
Wyndham’s Theatre, London Until December 9, 2hrs
Quiz
Chichester Festival Theatre Touring until December 2
2hrs 30mins
Kenneth Branagh, ever busy making Hercule Poirot films and what-not in the movie business, has been a stranger to the theatre. So it’s good to have him back in the
West End with a company of students and recent graduates from his old acting school, the Royal Academy of Dramatic
Art, playing King Lear for 50 performances.
Branagh once did a four-hour Hamlet. Now he’s gone all minimalist, cutting the epic down to only two hours, no interval.
It is set in ancient Britain (a nod, perhaps, to Branagh’s great hero Laurence Olivier, who did a druid-style version of the play on TV 40 years ago) with the cast in Game Of Thrones-style wolfskins, big sticks instead of swords and everyone needing a good wash.
On the evidence here, Branagh also needs a good director. Our Ken has directed this himself, so there’s no one to check his habit of emphasising every single word as if he was talking to thick foreigners. Also, he’s clearly been lifting weights so he never looks frail enough for the demented king’s ‘fourscore’ years.
The company features Deborah Alli and Melanie-Joyce Bermudez as wicked sisters Goneril and Regan. But the revelation is Jessica Revell as the adoring Cordelia (who Lear so disastrously disinherits), who doubles up as the Fool.
Joseph Kloska’s Gloucester (he gets his eyes ripped out) is like Lear – not physically vulnerable enough. Yet all the young actors here get some priceless West End exposure. That generosity is typical of the Branagh approach.
The ending is worth it. Branagh – the old king now broken and utterly powerless – curls up and dies beside the dead Cordelia in a scene of heart-stopping sorrow. But too often it’s a show in a rush, one that skates over the play’s great theme of man’s inhumanity to man.
Rory Bremner is the reason to see Quiz, now on tour. He’s cruelly brilliant playing the oily Chris Tarrant, host of TV quiz Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, in a play first seen six years ago. Bremner has the voice off to a tee, the squinting eyes and an extra ration of Tarrant’s smarm.
This is the tale of the ‘coughing major’ contestant Charles Ingram and his wife Diana (Lewis Reeves and Charley Webb), who cheated by the latter coughing in the audience at the right answers, winning (but never getting) the £1 million prize. It went to court and they and an accomplice were found guilty.
Essentially, the cash-hungry Ingram was a lousy actor. The way he opted definitely for answers he’d already rejected was never plausible and the programme-makers smelled a rat. Writer James Graham’s device of combining court room and TV studio works nicely and Mark Benton, multi-tasking in a variety of roles, animates the story. The play reminds us that we are a nation of nerds, quizzers and eccentrics. It’s never less than enjoyable though, inevitably, this once topical satire now seems a bit musty.