[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC Studios in Soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. I'm really grateful you're here. On today's show, singer songwriter Dawn Richard and musician Spencer Zahn will join us to talk about their new album Quiet in a World Full of Noise. Author Leslie Jamison is here to talk about her novel Peggy. It's a fictionalized account of the life of heiress Peggy Guggenheim, a novel she finished after her friend who worked on it for 10 years passed away.

That is our plan, so let's get this started with actor Kenneth Branagh in King Lear at The Shed.

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Alison Stewart: In my office, I have a copy of the complete works of Shakespeare, and there are introductions to each of the plays. For King Lear, it reads, "The tragedy of King Lear is usually regarded by critics as Shakespeare's greatest play, but is not his most popular, for there is something terrifying in the grandeur of the tragedy and its immense pessimism. Nor is the play often acted on stage, for the part of Lear requires an actor of exceptional range of emotional expression. Indifferently produced, Lear is tedious, but when greatly acted, it is almost too intolerably moving.

It's a good thing the actor Kenneth Branagh is in the role of Lear, who divides his kingdom between his two daughters who flatter him and banishes the third who won't. He comes to discover that children who once complimented him now have no time for him once they get husbands and land and he goes into the forest and slowly goes mad." Along with Branagh in the title role, the cast of King Lear is made of people who have studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, Radha, whose mission is "Dramatic arts training, transforming the next generation of talent."

This version of King Lear ran in London and now has brought Kenneth Branagh to the New York stage for just the third time. Last time he was on the show, he was here to talk about the film Belfast for which he won an Oscar for best screenplay. King Lear is at The Shed through December 15th. It's directed by Rob Ashford, Lucy Skilbeck, and Kenneth Branagh, who joins me now. Nice to talk to you.

Kenneth Branagh: Nice to talk to you. Thanks for having me, Alison.

Alison Stewart: Your cast is fairly young. [chuckles]

Kenneth Branagh: Yes, they are, many in their early 20s, and some it's their first job, and their youth and their drive and their passion and their commitment to it, it seems very much in tune with a play where perhaps the age old issue of youth being frustrated by the pace of change as initiated by, in their view, the old is a really powerful theme. All that youthful energy seems very complementary to the thematic work in the play.

Alison Stewart: What do you get creatively about working with young actors, some of whom it's their first big break?

Kenneth Branagh: I think they're very generous with their energy and with their time. They're very excited, for instance, to be here in New York. For many of them, it's their first time in New York, certainly to do a play here. They're already understanding it's an audience full of very sharp, quick-witted, sharp to humor. New York audiences will find humor wherever it exists, and there's always plenty in Shakespeare. I think what these young actors have is a capacity for playfulness as well.

They keep the experience very live and very felt, I think, which in our version, which is two hours long with no intermission, is setting a kind of pace where the events of the play, which take place in the way you've described inside this family, happen at breakneck speed. Decisions about family are made quickly. The heat. As one of the characters says, "We must do something." Many characters do things in the heat of the moment. There's not much time for consideration or reflection.

They go at it, and sometimes that really wreaks havoc. Our young company are very on the tip of their toes to let that play in a very live way, in my opinion.

Alison Stewart: In my opinion, you are young to play Lear. [chuckles] Why do you think your age-- what does it do to the character?

Kenneth Branagh: It's interesting. I think if you were saying that to King Lear, he might say, "Yeah, no, I agree with you." King Lear might say, "Yes, I feel perfectly fine." We set our version in what Shakespeare hints at an ancient Britain, where in terms of the pre-history of it all, we're playing in a world where survival is the order of the day, where the people who populate this landscape are in a fight or flight situation most of the day, either having to move quickly to avoid animals or trap animals, to find heat, or to escape natural disasters.

Age would have been much younger than-- I mean, in terms of someone who-- I'm 63 now. I mean, it feels as though somebody in their 40s back then would have been into a world of maturity that the demands of that world would have considered pretty mature. As it is, I think he feels he wants to have it both ways. He'd like to, at the beginning of the play, divide his kingdom in three, but he still wants to be called king, and he still wants all of the attributes.

He wants to have a hundred knights travel with him, and he wants to be able to live wherever he likes. He considers this his due. He considers it is right for those who are old and reverent for that to be part of a ongoing thank you for that which he, as a parent, has provided. He says, "I gave you all," to his kids. The kids say, "Yeah, and in good time you gave it." It took you a while. Once the keys to the car are handed over, the patience is short in the hands of those who now drive it.

Alison Stewart: So many actors want to play King Lear. Now that you've done it, do you understand why?

Kenneth Branagh: Well, it's an immense challenge because as your introduction hinted at, the play is considered a great achievement, and yet the character of Lear is someone who demonstrates what some might say is rabid immaturity. At the beginning of the play, he makes poor decisions. He is a man, as the play says, of unconstant starts. "He hath but slenderly known himself," says one of his daughters. You see how full of rage his person is. He is fiery and reactive, and so the natural sympathy of the audience doesn't necessarily start with Lear.

It seems as though Shakespeare takes him on a journey that has him lose everything that is of importance to him. The relationship initially with his most favorite daughter is the first one to be a casualty. Then, one by one, the other daughters. Then, the loss of his kingdom. Then, the loss of his sanity. Only then, it seems, when everything has been taken away, does he seem to have a pragmatic, perhaps more wise view of the world, which understands better how he might have changed things or done things differently.

At this point, with this insight and this self-knowledge, it's too late. He no longer sees his younger daughter. He is banished by his other two daughters. He doesn't have a kingdom, so whatever might have been his qualities at the beginning, he's lost the chance to use them, but he does access a quality of heart and soul that you might say is very inspiring. It's also moving because at the moment he acquires it, circumstances take away his chance to enjoy it.

Alison Stewart: Is that what the introduction to this play talked about, the emotional intelligence that it takes to play the role?

Kenneth Branagh: Well, I think it's more about the understanding that you aren't necessarily going to be liked. That's no hardship for an actor, but there's an association of a majestic grandeur that drumbeats its way through the evening, but in fact, you meet, maybe not King Lear, but in some ways you meet Mr. Lear, a more normal individual who perhaps disappoints you when you hope that a man of significant age and experience would perhaps bless you with his great largess and his wisdom, but in fact, he is as full of folly as the rest of us, doesn't necessarily seem to have learned so much.

Some people find that as you-- The word you used was the play being pessimistic. I think it is robust, it is pragmatic, it is rigorous in the way it has the audience consider what they might do in the same situation, and the thing about this play is that they can confront that pretty easily because the play takes place at the center of a family. Although he runs a country, the dynamics of the play are more concerned with how he gets on with his children than they are with how he negotiates treaties or wars with France, who eventually they are in conflict with.

In a way, I made a film years ago of Cinderella, and that same simple scenario begins that story. There's an element in the later plays of Shakespeare of the fairy tale. Here's a man with three daughters and an absent mother and they must find their way through life. In Cinderella, a new mother comes in, and that doesn't end well. Here, he asks his daughters to be his mother temporarily, a month at a time, with a hundred knights who will do whatever they like, and that doesn't end so well either.

It does seem to ask the audience to consider what they might do in the same situation, which it seems involves a plea for, if nothing else, a greater or different quality of listening. An ability to hear what people say and what is heard in this play are very differently understood by the speaker and by the hearer.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Kenneth Branagh. He's playing King Lear at The Shed through December 15th. The production uses the aisleways. Actors come off the stage, they come around, they come through the audience. You could feel them marching through the audience. Why did you choose to have that interaction?

Kenneth Branagh: At the end of the play, Edgar says, "The weight of this sad time we must obey. Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say." At two hours, with an emphasis on the hurly burly of this play, feeling not just the heart sore circumstances that the characters sort of negotiate, but the physical presence of the actors in a very dynamic space like the one at The Shed, that was important. We also have Dolby Atmos surround sound.

Alison Stewart: I want to ask about that. That's incredible.

Kenneth Branagh: Yes, it really does immerse you. I mean, I have to put earphones in backstage for the sub woofer bass speaker at the back. Really, it makes the ground shake, as indeed the conflict in ancient Britain does in the play. We invite the audience to feel that, not to a state of discomfort, but certainly to a state of audio immersion, and so it is when those actors who are chasing Edgar, for instance, when he is being hunted by the court, they chase around the back of the auditorium, and you really feel the sense of being surrounded by real thumping, running, aggressive people who are looking to catch someone and give them a hard time.

That sense of sensory involvement was something this space, the Shed, the Dolby Atmos and the production, which I think thanks to Rob Ashford and Lucy Skillbeck's co-direction, has brought even more than in London, the action out into the audience to involve them because it's a big ask, say, be here for two hours, be wrapped up in this thing for two hours. If we're going to do that, it feels like we need to hold people, not only with the extraordinary language that Shakespeare has, but with the action of the play. That physical immersion is important.

Alison Stewart: When you go in, there's this orb over the top of the stage, and sometimes it's the ocean, sometimes it's the heavens. It rotates, it goes up, it goes down. Tell me a little bit more about the orb. It's amazing.

Kenneth Branagh: Well, the connection to nature and to natural forces and to the planets is an obsession with this primitive society they have. It's not a Christian play particularly King Lear, it's much more a pagan play, so the movement of the planets, the passing of the seasons, the natural world. The most used word in the play is nature, whether it means the physical world of the landscape, whether it means human nature, personality. All of it involves a look for something that is regular, that supplies order, that has meaning.

We start with the skies, the movement of the planets, the movement of the moon. The moon, the sun referred to regularly, the markers, the compass points against which people try to impose order in an otherwise chaotic world. We wanted to feel that this sense of a larger physical world that, again, in the space of The Shed, allows us to open up the stage. There's quite a widescreen feel to it, where our awareness of the natural world and of sometimes the puniness of mankind.

When Lear encounters someone he refers to as a poor, naked wretch, which is Edgar disguised as poor Tom, a mad beggarman, as he's referred to, he says, "Is man no more than this unaccommodated man. A man without a house, a man who's not inside, a man who's outside is no more than such a bare, forked animal as thou art." That difference between human beings and animals without the same sort of sentient qualities is described as being a very, very slim divide, and that which keeps us the right side of it is looking for a way to steer.

We steer through the heavens, through the mountains, through the water, through the seas. The sea is another huge element in King Lear. The natural world and our hopes for its guidance are a big part of this production.

Alison Stewart: We have the orb, we have the stage, we have Stonehenge-like buildings, but it's fairly simple. There are no crowns. What do you hope the audience gets out of not seeing so much in the play?

Kenneth Branagh: Interesting question. We felt as though there was something that was even more powerfully demanded by the characters than that which a golden crown represents. In a way, what Lear seems to want is, to use modern parlance that might seem quite cliched, but he wants respect, and he wants to be seen, and he wants to be acknowledged. Even he knows that that isn't just because he's wearing a crown, but in fact, it turns out maybe that's why he was accorded it.

For he uses a phrase where he says, "Thou hast heard a farmer's dog bark at a beggar and the creature run from the cur? There thou might beholdst the great image of authority, a dog's obeyed in office. Without office, which he is because he renounces his kingdom, that respect doesn't come. We wanted, I suppose, to make it a more raw, more primal engagement with these human needs.

A golden coronet was, although symbolic of the things I'm speaking about, was less important than the love of his daughters, which he chooses unwisely to be conditional at the beginning on them saying out loud in front of anyone, unwarned of the request, how much they love him and teases further, depending on what you say, I will decide how much of the kingdom to give you. He might ultimately say, "Look, that was me just being. Yes, of course, it's silly, but that's what I needed.

I wanted people to say nice things about me in front of everybody else because I'm finding it hard to give this thing up. His younger daughter, a chip off the old block, says, "Well, that's ridiculous. No, I'm not going to say that--"

Alison Stewart: She seems truly hurt by Cordelia.

Kenneth Branagh: Yes, I think he loves her. When later on in the play, the other daughters say, "Why do you need a hundred knights? Why do you need-- [crosstalk]

Alison Stewart: [unintelligible 00:17:08]. [laughs]

Kenneth Branagh: Exactly, Exactly. You live in our house, use our servants. How many people need to make you a cup of tea, as it were? He says, "A reason, not the need, our basest beggars are in the poorest things superfluous. Allow not nature more than nature needs. Man's life is cheap as beasts. It squirms around a kind of answer, which is, it doesn't really matter what I want. I just want it, and it would be nice if I could get it. Why do I have to explain? 100 knights, 200 knights, one guy, three guys, it doesn't matter. I want it because I deserve it.

They view that in a different way, and in that difference of opinion, a whole catastrophic catalog of events unfolds for the kingdom of Britain.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Kenneth Branagh. He's King Lear in the play King Lear. It's at The Shed until December 15th. Watching your king go mad, as they say, it was actually a little bit like watching perhaps somebody suffer from dementia. Your body changes quite a bit from the beginning, bounce onto stage, and it's slowly and you deteriorate. What did you think about the way your body would change, how it would change over the course of the two hours?

Kenneth Branagh: You feel this heaviness of his developing understanding, painful understanding of what the realpolitik of it is, which is that he simply having exited the stage once the title is gone, he says, "I want to retain the name and all the additions to a king." In the very next scene, Oswald, one of the servants to his daughter Goneril, chooses not to give him that. He says, "Who am I?" He says, "My lady's father." It's absolutely not what he just asked for. Once that is taken away, he feels beaten down, I think, by it, and so that does affect your body.

It's as if he wants to, by the time he gets to the storm, the storm that he hopes is somehow his friend, and sees this poor naked wretch, poor Tom, he wants to disrobe. He says, "Off, off, you lendings come unbutton. I'll be like him. I will be born again." He's almost childlike by the end. By the time Cordelia finds him as mad as the vexed sea singing aloud, he has lost everything, including, in a way, the capacity to physically move the way he did.

He has to acknowledge this thing, which maybe his family thought was true of him at the beginning, but he did not, where he says, with a terrible weight but perhaps a freeing honesty, he says, "You must bear with me. Pray you now forget and forgive. I am old and foolish." If he could have maybe understood that in a compassionate way at the beginning of the play, in a loving way, then maybe life would not have changed. Instead, ego got in the way and want and what he believed was need got in the way. I think it physically slows him down, as he gives into what appears to be the inevitable, "Dad, your time is over."

Alison Stewart: As you said, the play's two hours, no intermission. It could be as long as four hours. Something that came to me as I was watching it. A lot of Lear scenes are cut. It felt more like an ensemble piece. Was that intentional?

Kenneth Branagh: Yes, I think that it seems that the dynamics between the family, between the mirrored family, the Gloucester family, where instead of daughters, two sons variously disappoint or pain or break the heart of their father, Gloucester. The full context of quite what this single personal decision, which is really when Cordelia says with effortless Shakespearean simplicity in response to her father's request, essentially, she says, "Nothing," and he says, "Nothing?" She says, "Nothing, my lord. Nothing will come of nothing."

Well, plenty comes of this particular nothing, and it seems to me that the way in which that feeds out into the country at large. By the end, one sliding doors, mixed moment, missed moment at the beginning of the play means that from a family occasion which was going well, from one offensive remark taken with hurt by one man in one room in one palace for one family by the end of the play has the kingdom invaded by another European country, and it all takes place in the space of about three weeks.

The catastrophe of that, the acceleration of it, is the escalation that these two hours that we present chooses to emphasize that from these decisions in rooms-- Someone once said there's a theory that the world is run by 40 people who know 40 people. Well, we're in with about 4 or 10 of them that run this particular world, and you see that if they aren't in sync, then the other four million people are going to get hurt.

Alison Stewart: How is King Lear relevant today?

Kenneth Branagh: I think that you understand how difficult it is to make a transition in power. Now, that could be the simple power of a family where maybe informally, father or mother or both, if they're around, step aside and the responsibilities that they would otherwise have had are passed on smoothly to the family. That isn't so easy. There is sibling rivalry. We have three daughters in this play that don't get on.

It is hard when a leader, however well intentioned, you could argue whether Lear is or not, however well intentioned, has a plan for, if I may quote the title of the famous television program of recent memory, Succession, there is a program that he who has the power may suggest, and there is that which is dictated by the individual reactions of the people involved. I think the transition of power, either informally or in the larger governmental sense, set against the human factor, is a story worth telling again and again and again.

The work that is required for everyone to understand and hear, within reason, the same thing, to understand the same thing and perhaps to be able to apply the same thing, it's a tough call, and sometimes that part of human development is not a smooth transition. It's a great traumatic shock. King Lear, alas, ignites one of these in this play. Dramatically, it's very, very compelling, vut as Tolstoy, a great writer who relinquished power in the latter part of his life said, "It's worth, through art, trying to show mankind what they are, and if they can see it, perhaps they can change.

Alison Stewart: King Lear will be at The Shed until December 15th. Kenneth Branagh has been my guest. Thank you for coming to the studio.

Kenneth Branagh: Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.