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King Lear at the Fountain of Youth
Kenneth Branagh’s production is fleet and facile.
At the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art one summer, I spent three days sitting on the edge of my chair (we weren’t allowed to lean back) painstakingly reading Pericles aloud as a towering Liverpudlian director snapped at our cast after every phrase, “What does that mean? Aesthetically, the production is pitched somewhere between Vikings and The Dark Crystal, in a Neolithic Albion where everyone carries stone-tipped spears and wears a lot of fur, baggy linen, and cute leather boots and belts (pay no attention to the trendy buckles and rubber soles). Jon Bausor, who designed costumes and set, surrounds the stage with Stonehenge-like slabs and suspends an enormous, doughnut-shaped projection surface above it — a kind of looming God’s eye where, as the audience enters, galaxies and nebulae swirl murkily.
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