Dimming Shakespeare's Glories

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

When Britain's new and little-known Renaissance troupe was booked to play King Lear and A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, the nine-week run sold out before the first preview. The draw: the U.S. stage debut of the company's founder, Kenneth Branagh, 28. His gutsy current film of Henry V has won him comparison to Orson Welles and Laurence Olivier. As he did in the film, Branagh onstage would triple as impresario, director and star -- with the fillip of featuring his wife of five months, Emma Thompson, as Midsummer's willowy Helena and Lear's gnarled Fool. Despite the troupe's alphabetical billing, what was on offer was plainly a star turn.

The productions opened last week and once again proved Branagh an artist of unrivaled promise but unfinished growth. As a performer he was the most confident and compelling figure onstage without hogging attention. As a director he showed a keen and kindly sense of humor, recurrent sparks of visual and literary imagination and a solid gift for getting a story told. But the company he guided was uneven and, worse, unsubtle. There were almost no quiet moments of insight into the characters' souls. It would be hard to imagine better, more accessible productions for audiences seeing the plays for the first time or duller, more disappointing ones for playgoers who know the texts well. Perhaps that is why reviewers tended to be regretful while audiences in Los Angeles, which does not have much of a Shakespeare tradition, chortled and cheered.

The deeper problem in Branagh's approach of demythologizing the plays and diminishing their epic heroes to shopkeeper scale -- as he also determinedly does in the film Henry V -- is that he tends to conceal or cut out the glories that make Shakespeare unique. Lear, for example, drops much of the high-flown language and reduces the former King's mad scenes in the storm and at Dover from symphonies to single brief movements. As played by Richard Briers, this is no autumnal monarch but a mediocre middle manager peevishly protesting his pink slip.

On the positive side, Branagh's stress on ensemble acting makes an interesting case for the play as a portrait of a whole society gone rotten rather than as a personal tragedy. His own portrayal of Edgar, the fugitive son of a mistrustful lord, comes as close as an actor can to making sense of the play's parallel set of antic mad scenes and willful disguises.

Midsummer is radical chiefly in its frivolousness. Where during the past two decades Peter Brook and other directors found dark depths of class and sexual conflict, Branagh rediscovers airy-fairy folly and anything-for-a-laugh delight. Freud has nothing to do with this version. Its inspiration is more on the order of Me and My Girl, and the song-and-dance finale was actually staged by that show's choreographer, Gillian Gregory.

In another sly reversal the nobles all play over the top, while the workingmen show quiet dignity. As Peter Quince, Branagh resembles a silent clown a la Jacques Tati -- even when speaking -- while Briers gives the oafish Bottom genuine intelligence and charm. Alas, these innovations are more interesting to ponder later than to watch; they squash the best jokes. Thompson contributes a memorably frantic Helena. Yet the main virtue of seeing these productions is collector's value for the future. Branagh is off to a spectacular start, but it is only a start.