Kenneth Branagh to play Shakespeare's troubled monarch King Lear in London and New York

Kenneth Branagh is to star as the tormented King Lear in a brand new production that he will also direct in London and New York.

The play will run for 50 performances at Wyndham’s theatre in the London’s West End from October and then transfer to the Shed’s Griffin theatre in the New York in autumn 2024.

It is produced by the Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company (KBTC) which presented a season of seven plays at the Garrick theatre in London from 2015-16 including John Osborne’s The Entertainer, with Branagh in the lead role.

In 2017, Branagh directed Tom Hiddleston as ‘great Dane’, Hamlet, in a limited-run production to raise funds for Rada.

In 2021, KTBC’s planned production of The Browning Version by Terence Rattigan, starring and directed by Branagh, was cancelled due to Covid-related absences during rehearsals.

Branagh, who previously played Edgar opposite Richard Briers’ Lear in a 1990 touring production of the Shakespearean tragedy, said in a 2019 interview that King Lear has a “sense of contained outrage by previously voiceless people” that remains relevant to the modern political climate.

The bard’s play, he added, explores a “tremendous lack of forgiveness … that is perhaps also something that our world is experiencing – a savage and judgmental and instant and violent division”.

King Lear, in preparation for his old age, divides his power and land between two of his daughters.

He becomes destitute, insane and a proscribed crux of political machinations.

The first known performance of any version of Shakespeare's play was on Saint Stephen's Day in 1606.

The play was often revised after the English Restoration for audiences who disliked its dark and depressing tone, but since the 19th century, Shakespeare's original play has been regarded as one of his supreme achievements.

Both the title role and the supporting roles have been coveted by accomplished actors, and the play has been widely adapted.

In A Defence of Poetry, Percy Bysshe Shelley called King Lear "the most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world", and the play is regularly cited as one of the greatest works of literature ever written.