By Alex Poots, Artistic Director

My first conversations with Kenneth Branagh about a new production of King Lear for The Shed took place in 2018. This was inspired by our collaboration on his inventive and visceral Macbeth that he performed and co-directed with Rob Ashford for the Manchester International Festival (2013) and then the Park Avenue Armory (2014). So it’s my great privilege to be reuniting Ken and Rob who, together with Lucy Skilbeck, are co-directing this original and timely new production of the Bard’s late masterwork.

King Lear’s choice to divide his kingdom leads to catastrophic upheaval that ruins the social order as it tears his family apart, leaving the younger generation to pick up the pieces. In the following pages, Lucy outlines the play’s historical relation to the present. Undoubtedly, the play’s themes resonate with our own time of social, environmental, and political upheaval.

I’m so grateful to our highly talented creative team, young cast, Shed staff, and producing partners KBTC and Fiery Angel for their skills and dedication to realizing this innovative production of King Lear for The Shed’s Griffin Theater. As Rob writes in his note, this new, intimate production does away with a traditional proscenium staging and accomplishes so much more, heightening the directors’ cinematic vision. I invite you to read the co-directors’ notes, as well as the excerpt of a conversation I had with Kenneth at The Shed in March, all included below. Together, they open a window into the creative process that connects Ancient Britain to 21st-century New York.

By Lucy Skilbeck, Director

“Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out”
—King Lear, Act 5, Scene 3

Queen Elizabeth I of England died in 1603 after 45 years on the throne. James VI of Scotland became James I of England and accelerated his ambition to unite England and Scotland, taking the title “King of Great Britain.”

On November 4, 1605, the Gunpowder Plot in London was foiled. Plotter Guy Fawkes was found with 36 barrels of gunpowder in a cellar under the House of Lords. Intending to blow up the building during the State Opening of Parliament the following day, the attempted regicide of King James was seen by the plotters as “tyrannicide”—the removal of a tyrant king.

In 1606, Shakespeare wrote King Lear. Macbeth (1606 – 07) is regarded as Shakespeare’s response to the Gunpowder Plot, but it surely informed King Lear as well. State upheaval and violence fueled by “o’er vaulting ambition” are evident in both plays.

In King Lear, unusually, the king removes himself from power. Expecting to enjoy a retirement from the responsibilities of kingship, instead he causes disunity: a turbulent space, an instability. Wanting love, Lear creates ambition. Expecting loyalty, he provokes betrayal. Does this send him mad? Or does he clearly see, perhaps for the first time, the madness of power: of reaching for it, and of losing it. And the hope offered by those who strive to hold it fairly and peaceably.

This year, 2024, has seen more elections than at any other time in recorded history. More than 80 countries, holding between them more than half of the world’s population, have gone to the polls. We are experiencing the instability, the turbulent space, brilliantly articulated in King Lear. Who loses and who wins?

Shakespeare’s genius lies in writing plays that speak to all times. King Lear, set by Shakespeare in Ancient Britain, reflected his own unstable times, and the dangers of disunity. As personal, national, and international relationships are redrawn following this historic year, King Lear is as relevant and urgent as it was in 1606.

By Rob Ashford, Director

I’m thrilled to be a part of bringing King Lear to The Shed.

The Griffin Theater provides an epic backdrop for this production. There is no proscenium arch, which allows the stage to appear as if it’s floating in a black void. The large stones seem to be the only thing anchoring it. The thrust of the large central disc pushes right out into the audience, which surrounds it. The actors enter and exit the playing space from all directions, which includes the audience in the drama. The substantial width of The Griffin affords a cinematic dynamism to the production. There is new technology from Dolby that wraps the sound around the space. Are we in the distant past or the distant future? All these elements are employed as the audience and the actors set out together on this journey of King Lear.

This wonderful space has unleashed the production. It allows journeys from all directions, provides a place for bloody battles and for lovers’ assignations, a lonely beach at Dover and, of course, a stormy heath for Lear lost in the wilderness.

I don’t think this telling of Shakespeare’s Lear could possibly have a more fitting home than The Griffin.

In March, Kenneth Branagh met with The Shed’s artistic director, Alex Poots, to discuss this new production of King Lear. The longtime collaborators talked about Branagh’s first impressions of the play as a young man, the importance of crispness and clarity in delivering Shakespeare’s language, the cast’s training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), and the process of working with this production’s co-directors, Rob Ashford and Lucy Skilbeck.

This conversation excerpt was edited for length and clarity. Watch the full-length video of the discussion.

Alex Poots:
King Lear has been an influential work for you from a young age. Would you share your overarching vision of the play?

Kenneth Branagh:
I first saw King Lear when I was 17 years old, and all I knew was that the world talked about it as a big, fancy play that was important.

I went to see a production and was amazed at how familiar and recognizable the story was. I came from a working-class background, a nonliterary background, so I had been intimidated going in.

But there’s a beginning, a middle, and an end. A very clear structure. And at the center of it, there’s a family undergoing this tremendous change in their fortunes.The play’s imposing grandeur fell away, but an urgent, familiar, recognizable story about human beings was what I carried away. If Lear was supposed to be a play about aging, then I found it did not restrict my interest. I was as passionately interested in it at 17 as I am at 63.

Poots:
Throughout your career you’ve found ways to create Shakespearean productions for the stage and the screen that bring the genius of the Bard to a much wider audience. For this new production, what were your original intentions in terms of the text, the production, the pacing?

Branagh:
A driving idea was to be as urgent as possible. In our modern world, we are used to being very, very reactive. There can be a virtue to not giving too much time to think. Two hours is the complete running time of this condensed production. There’s no intermission. Many productions—many brilliant and great productions, I might add—finish the first half of the full-length play at the two-hour point. But we chose to emphasize an idea about Lear’s “unconstant” behavior at the beginning when he divides the kingdom “rashly.” Some would say foolishly; some would say it’s his right to do it this way. But one way or another, it does not go well. What happens then is described as “hideous rashness.” It is from this reckless drive that the production attempts to evolve, with a pace that limits the characters’ time to think, affects the audience’s space to think, but hopefully allows an invitation for everybody to feel.

Poots:
In early conversations, we discussed the importance of selecting an entire cast who are not only actors from RADA but who are recent graduates. As the departing president and a graduate of RADA, why was this choice significant to you?

Branagh:
At RADA, they try to find all the ways in which an actor can gather technique and still remain playful and truthful, and for that technique to be invisible to the audience. The characters in the play can be youthful, relentless, unforgiving, and impatient, but they need to be brilliant in terms of the crispness and clarity with which their words are delivered. Distant language needn’t be an obstacle. Our job is to ensure that the communication is as clear as possible. These young RADA graduates try to address that challenge each evening.

Shakespeare is for all and can be presented in infinite ways, but the idea of a visible and vibrant youth inside this production was important. It is part of what the play demands. At its center are issues that are universal and currently relevant. Is there an age at which one is no longer fit to do one’s job? When is responsibility handed to the next generation? These are age-old questions.

The only qualification required to understand Shakespeare is to be human.

Poots:
When we first worked together on the Scottish Play at the Park Avenue Armory, you collaborated and co-directed with Rob Ashford, with whom we later started preliminary discussions about King Lear for The Shed, originally planned for 2020. Now that this reunion is possible along with your other co-director, Lucy Skilbeck, would you tell us about your collaboration?

Branagh:
Thanks to you, Alex, I’ve had a 12-year creative relationship with Rob. We’ve co-directed a number of Shakespeares together: Macbeth at the Park Avenue Armory, The Winter’s Tale, and Romeo and Juliet. A conversation about many Shakespeare plays has ensued, including the one you were kind enough to offer us to come and work on at The Shed in 2020. We know that things changed for the world at that point…

But it’s been an ongoing conversation, and now it’s a triumvirate directing with Lucy Skilbeck, who was a phenomenal associate director with us in the West End when we first did the show, and Rob. We’ve got three very concentrated minds to try to define this play in an immediate, urgent, and evolving way—a visceral way—to tell the stories that Shakespeare gives us, concentrating on the emotional center as far as we can judge it. With Rob’s gift for the visual staging of the plays and Lucy’s textual rigor, we’ve developed a shared language that folds in my experience with cinematic storytelling.

We feel very lucky to have this company of collaborators and particularly privileged to play for New York audiences at The Shed.