A Lesser Lear, and a Greater

Kenneth Branagh in King Lear. (Photo: Johan Persson)

You can see the problem with the imported two-hour-without-intermission King Lear, co-directed by Kenneth Branagh, Rob Ashford and Lucy Skilbeck, in the opening scene. Lear (played by Branagh) sweeps onto the stage of The Shed and dives into the love contest among his three daughters. Goneril (Deborah Alli) recites her stock speech declaring her bottomless love for her father, but when the invisible baton is passed to Regan (Saffron Coomber), her outpouring of affection has been cut so drastically that all she seems to be saying is “Ditto.” So when Cordelia (Jessica Revell) refuses to “heave [her] heart into [her] mouth” and Lear’s response is to divide her intended portion of his land between her elder sisters, you wonder why he’s more put out than he was by Regan’s spare offering. In fact, the king seems angrier at Kent (played, bafflingly, as a woman, by Eleanor de Rohan) than anyone else. The scene has no weight; it feels like a plot set-up.

It’s fine to pare down Shakespeare; almost no one – except Branagh! – has attempted to play Hamlet uncut. (And the results were sublime.) But when you leave out nearly half of King Lear, Shakespeare’s most overpoweringly emotional play, you do so at your peril. This version has no poetry (even when it’s right there in the lines), no grandeur, no power; it seems like a performance of the plot, and who would go to Lear for the plot? Branagh defends his choice in an interview with Alex Poots, The Shed’s artistic director, explaining that he wanted to get at the urgency of the play, but that’s not a noun I would apply to this work. (Macbeth, maybe.) You go to Lear to have your heart broken, and the best I can say about this one is that it isn’t boring. And of course, you go to see a great actor playing the title role. But though Branagh reads the verse with finesse, he’s a sixty-three-year-old actor who looks fifty-three, and he’s not remotely frail, so what happens to him in the course of the play isn’t convincing and isn’t affecting. Even his mad scene doesn’t touch us: it feels like a recitation, with a focus on the fallen monarch’s ironic jokes – the audience laughs.

Branagh drew the supporting cast from recent rosters of Royal Academy of Dramatic Art students, and they’re no more than competent for the most part. Revell’s speech to her still-sleeping father just before their reunion is touching, and as Gloucester, Joseph Kloska stops acting so hard and comes to real emotional life after Cornwall blinds him and he realizes that he has wronged his faithful sun, Edgar. Dylan Corbett-Bader’s Edmund is poor and Coomber isn’t much better as Regan, but the rest of the ensemble passes muster. And that’s not much. But to be fair, it’s not clear what they’re supposed to do with this fatuous concept. Ashford co-directed Branagh’s Macbeth, which came in at just under two hours, but Macbeth is a much shorter play to begin with. This Lear shares with that show a wandering focus, the lack of a center. The insistence on speed is distracting. When Edgar is running away from his father’s castle, members of the ensemble chase him, calling out his name. Is this addendum really more important than the parts Branagh tossed out? And why the hell are they calling him anyway? Do they expect him to yell back, “Here I am!”?

James Earl Jones in King Lear, 1974. (Photo Courtesy of Everett Collection) 

When I was a college student in Boston, I took advantage of the city’s proximity to New York City – and the hospitality of my roommate’s family, who lived in the Village – to hop down to see Broadway shows when I got the chance. It was during my freshman year, on my intercession break in 1969, that I saw James Earl Jones in The Great White Hope from an orchestra seat. Jones had made an impression in Dr. Strangelove, but Jack Jefferson (a fictionalized version of Jack Johnson, the first Black boxer to become the world heavyweight champ) was the part that made him a star. The play, written by Howard Sackler, was showy and not very good, but its deficiencies didn’t make much difference when the show revolved around the spellbinding Jones. Late in the performance, his Jefferson staggered downstage with the body of his white girlfriend (Jane Alexander), who has just drowned herself, in his arms, and his portrayal of grief was as powerful and luminous as a fireball. My memory is that no one in the packed audience moved or uttered a sound, but after more than half a century I may be imposing my own paralysis onto the rest of the house. He played Jefferson again in the 1970 movie, but the director, Martin Ritt, couldn’t get a handle on the style, and everything the actor did felt too big for the camera – a problem that, as we all know, he never had again. But that scene in the Broadway production was indelible.

Jones, who died on September 9 at the age of ninety-three, started his career on television soap operas a dozen years before Stanley Kubrick tapped him for the role of Lieutenant Lothar Zogg in Strangelove: he played doctors in The Guiding Light and As the World Turns. You can find on YouTube the last TV appearance he made before Strangelove, as Joe Goodwin in the short-lived, fondly remembered series East Side, West Side, where George C. Scott and Cicely Tyson played Manhattan social workers. In “Who Do You Kill?,” telecast in 1963, Jones and Diana Sands were a couple whose efforts to navigate the many faces of racial discrimination plunge her into depression and him into fury. The episode, which you can watch on YouTube, is preachy and Tom Gries’s direction is clumsy and uncontrolled – he lets the performers act all over the set. But something authentic breaks through in the work of these two stunningly talented young Black actors. (Sands, who co-starred in the film version of A Raisin in the Sun and in Hal Ashby’s The Landlord, was twenty-nine, Jones thirty-two. A decade later, she was dead from cancer.)

Jones was outsize in every sense – physically (a stocky six foot two, he looked like a boxer, or a longshoreman), emotionally, and of course vocally. He had one of the most phenomenal vocal instruments in the business: when he spoke a line, even if kept the volume low, what emerged sounded like it had been dug out of a mine, and you swore you could hear not only layers of earth but rivers running through it. When he grinned, he worked every muscle in his face; when he laughed, he seemed to be starting an avalanche. It’s hard to think of a performer whose tools for expressing emotion were so profound. And his resources extended even beyond what is generally the purview of an actor. It wasn’t just that he was a great actor, though God knows he was; he was also an enormous giver of pleasure on the order of Louis Armstrong.

His list of film credits was extensive. Most of the movies he made weren’t memorable – which I think is scandalous – though he had a tendency to light up both the large and the small screen even in small roles. But I want to mention two performances I particularly love, both from early in his movie career. In the 1974 Claudine, a gritty, bristling, unconventional romantic comedy written by Tina and Lester Pine and directed by John Berry about working-class African Americans, he plays Roop (for Rupert), a trash collector who courts a domestic (Diahann Carroll, in the title role) with half a dozen kids while both of them battle government systems rigged against them. The two stars are wonderful together – warm, funny, complicated and as sexy as Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night or Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda in The Lady Eve. It is, in fact, the sexiest performance I’ve ever seen from him, even when Roop is trying to talk Claudine into a date while he’s hauling garbage cans with a smeared face and a bandana tied across his forehead. In a very different key, he does a grand vaudevillian turn as Leon Carter in The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings, John Badham’s raucous debut picture, with a script by Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins about the Negro baseball leagues. Most of his scenes are with Billy Dee Williams (in easily his best performance), who plays Bingo, the inventive team captain and Leon’s closest friend. With Richard Pryor and Stan Shaw heading the supporting cast, the movie has charisma to burn, but no one’s is brighter than Jones’s when he’s on the field or riding ahead of the team cars on a motorbike under a jockey’s cap and a pair of old-school goggles. Yet it’s a generous piece of acting: he shares the screen with his fellow actors rather than running away with the picture, though you know that he could steal them all blind if he cared to.

I was lucky enough to see Jones on stage several times after The Great White Hope made me a lifelong fan. He was inspiriting as the retiring U.S. president in The Best Man, as Hoke in Driving Miss Daisy, as Grandpa Vanderhof in You Can’t Take It with You. (These were all Broadway revivals in the 2010’s.) I didn’t see him live in the Shakespeare productions he appeared in at the Public Theater in the Joe Papp days, but PBS’s Theater in America televised his King Lear in 1974, and you can see that on YouTube as well. It’s a dishearteningly mediocre production – staged by Ed Sherin, his director on The Great White Hope – and most of the supporting cast is inadequate, miscast or downright bad. (The exceptions are Douglass Watson’s Kent, Lee Chamberlain’s Cordelia and the fiercely imaginative Edgar of Rene Auberjonois.) But Jones is spectacular, in a role one has to say he was born to play. The greatest English Lears are celebrated – Laurence Olivier, Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi – but their Lears came late in burnished classical careers. Jones did it in his forties, and if there has been an American Lear more suffused with feeling, more drenched in grandeur, I haven’t seen it.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.