December 14, 1989 | Not the face of a matinee idol, not at all, and certainly not the grave majesty of a king. Relaxing in his Houston hotel suite, Kenneth Branagh is a stocky, fleshy-faced Irishman with a quiet, contemplative voice and a ready smile that stops just a few meters short of a boyish grin. He could be seated on the barstool next to yours and you might not notice him, unless he wanted to start a conversation. But when he takes the stage, or screen, you can’t take your eyes off him.
Among actors of his generation in England, Branagh is easily the most acclaimed, probably the most accomplished, and definitely the most ambitious.
At 24, he was the youngest actor ever to star in Henry V for the Royal Shakespeare Company. At 26, he launched his own stage company, Renaissance Theatre, by serving as writer, producer and star of a world premiere drama, Public Enemy. (The title, incidentally, does not refer to Branagh’s slight, much-remarked-about resemblance to James Cagney.)
At 28, he has already written an autobiography, Beginnings, and made his debut as a feature filmmaker with a grand new version of Henry V, which opens Friday at the Spectrum 9 Theatre.
Filming this particular play, previously produced in 1944 as a rousing wartime screen spectacle by Laurence Olivier, was perhaps inevitable for an actor-director widely hailed as “the new Olivier.”
Still, like much of what Branagh has accomplished in so short a time, it has ruffled a few stately feathers in certain quarters of England’s artistic community.
When the film opened a few months ago in London, Branagh notes, most of the reviews were enthusiastic. But one strongly dissenting voice could be heard among the hosannas: “The greatest act of hubris since Prometheus absconded with the rights to divine fire.”
That, Branagh says, was “a bit excessive.”
Of course, he quickly adds, it’s not the first time he’s been forced to consider that, as his worst critics suggest, he is an insufferably cheeky upstart.
“Yes, that has certainly occurred to me,” Branagh said a few days ago. “And, of course, many people have said it about me, without me having to think it.
“There’s a kind of reckless-stroke-fearless streak that’s pretty Irish, I think. Something slightly mad and romantic about wanting to do things like this. I can’t do much about that — that’s in there. It means that you sometimes make massive mistakes. But you learn a great deal very quickly. It concentrates experiences, it concentrates the mind wonderfully, to be quite forward. Or whatever people would describe it as.”
Branagh, a Belfast native, believes an acute awareness of mortality, of the death sentence we’re all given at birth, is an intrinsic part of the Irish psyche.
“I’ve certainly felt that thing of, you really aren’t on this planet for very long. And without walking over people, you’ve got a certain kind of responsibility to take opportunities if they’re there. I was talking to a guy in a wheelchair the other week, a guy who’d been a college athlete, who now can hardly move. And we were talking about this very thing. And he said, ‘Of course, you must . . . do these things.’ With no bitterness, no rancor on his part. But, basically, he’s a very graphic example of, ‘You don’t know what’s going to happen to you tomorrow.’ This guy had been fit and healthy, with a wonderful future, and just had an accident.
“I was always brought up that way, to think, you know, ‘Eat that meal — somebody else would be glad of it.’ Try and live for today, and don’t plan too much, don’t dwell on the past, just get on with it.
“Especially if you have any talent, if you have any luck — go for it. Not aggressively, snarlingly. And along the way — because otherwise, it’s not worth doing — enjoy it.”
This unaffected enthusiasm — this insistence on making an audience enjoy rather than endure classical theater — is a hallmark of Branagh’s Renaissance Company. Derek Jacobi and Judi Dench, two kindred spirits who also appear in Henry V, have directed their own Shakespearean stagings for Renaissance. Like Branagh, they have tried to make the poetry “sound like real speech, sound naturalistic . . . dropping barriers of intimidation about this revered, dull playwright.” It’s the same bold, bracingly direct approach Branagh has taken to the Renaissance Company’s first film production.
Actually, Branagh says, there is nothing dull about either film version of Henry V. But each version, Olivier’s and his own, is very much a production of its own time.
“In 1944,” Branagh says, “you wanted a glamorous, heroic, romantic, clean, slow, steady progress toward a certain victory against a weak enemy. That’s what you wanted to know while the D-Day landings were happening. People didn’t want to know about the rest of it.”
So Olivier scrupulously trimmed Shakespeare’s text, removing all mention of Henry’s ruthlessness as a warrior-king, and the threat of betrayal by trusted confederates.
For his version, Branagh has restored those elements, for a darker, more troublingly ambiguous view of Henry as a man “with one foot in the dirty world of politics, and one foot in Camelot.”
“In this way,” Branagh says, “I think it focuses on the fallibility of those people we try to create as heroes. For the Elizabethans, Henry V was a great hero, a great national figure, a great political figure. Shakespeare clearly admires him more than any other king he writes about. But he presents him warts and all, I think.
“But I think our own time is both obsessed with heroes, and obsessed with trying to pick them apart. And I guess Shakespeare’s posing a lot of questions about the nature of heroism. His basic point, I think, is that, as Henry says, ‘The king is but a man, as I am . . .’ That’s the keynote for our film: He’s just a man. And yet, as William says, ‘Forget it, don’t expect us to feel sympathy for you. Tough. This is your job.’
“The discussion point, I think, is: What kind of heroes do we want? Shakespeare says they’re always going to be flawed. They’re always going to be imperfect. Henry is a killer, he is ruthless, he is chilly. Do you still like him? Would you like to be led by him? Would you have been on that campaign?
“And if you accept any kind of political system, dare you also accept that people are inevitably going to be compromised?”
Branagh had never directed a film, had only acted in a handful of TV and movie productions, when he decided to work both sides of the camera for Henry V. He consulted a few textbooks before filming began, “to learn all about lenses and stuff, at least so I couldn’t be blinded by science.” For the most part, though, he learned by doing. The education was not an easy one.
The most difficult aspect, he admits, was maintaining the level of his performance, charting Henry’s slow evolution from untested youth into fiercely charismatic leader, while at the same time worrying about the thousand and one things every director worries about during every day of shooting.
“We shot the film in chronological order,” he says, “which was very important. Because I felt much changed, I must say, on an almost daily basis, by dealing with the kind of responsibility I had as director. And we tried, technically, with makeup as well, to look harder, and tougher, and more worldly, by the end. So everything was designed to see a boy become a man.
“The key link was having played it before, and having an idea of how it should develop. So I kept having a performance that had a kind of arc to it. Fortunately, I’ve already done it about 140 times.”
Branagh, the son of working-class Protestant parents, says he started acting at age 9, after his family moved from the mean streets of Belfast to Reading in Berkshire. After that, Branagh says, “It was a question of being English at school, and being Irish at home. It was a bad time to be Irish in Reading, where we were, because there were lots of people with brothers and uncles and fathers in the army, in Northern Ireland.”
But it was a worse time to be Irish in Belfast. That’s why Branagh’s family left Ireland in the first place.
“My father had been working away for a while, in England. And my mother was pregnant. And I remember a crowd invading our street one night, and smashing all the windows of the Catholic houses on the street — it was a mixed street. And I remember that being very terrifying.
“I remember being shoved under a table in the back room, hysterical, it was so frightening. There were hundreds of people, screaming as they passed by. And suddenly everybody was in the street, and paving stones were ripped up.
“That was not good for a pregnant woman whose husband was away. It was clearly going to get worse. So when my father got a permanent job in England — that came with a house that we could rent — we left.”
At 16, Branagh began to seriously consider a life on stage.
“It was a conscious decision — and a surprising one — where it really was like a kind of seeing the light. I’d been interested in journalism up to that point, and I reviewed children’s books for the local paper.
“And then I was in a play, and a teacher made the foolish mistake of saying, ‘You know, you could do this professionally.’ And that was the first time the light went off, and I thought, ‘Well, Christ, I suppose I could.’
“So then I just read and read and read, and just devoted myself to trying to educate myself about this strange world that my parents thought was peopled with unemployed homosexuals.”
Branagh studied at the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and made his first big splash in a West End production of Julian Mitchell’s Another Country. Before Henry V, he was best known to audiences outside England for his work in the BBC miniseries Fortunes of War in which he was first teamed with his future wife and Henry V co-star, Emma Thompson.
With the tumultuous experience of filming Henry V under his belt, Branagh is looking for new worlds, and new audiences, to conquer.
Next month, he will be in Los Angeles with his Renaissance Company, staging two productions — King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream — at the Mark Taper Forum. After that, there will be a worldwide tour that will bring the Renaissance man to Japan, Chicago and Europe.
And then? Well, Shakespeare did write several other plays, and many of them would be very suitable for filming.
Indeed, as Branagh sees it, Shakespeare himself would be writing screenplays if he were writing at all in this part of the 20th century.
“I feel that he’d be writing for the Lethal Weapon audience, as broad an audience as that. I certainly feel that’s what he wrote for, originally, and was very much aware of. He really did write across the board. I feel that if we could have been on the phone to his agent, while we were filming Henry V, he would have told us, ‘Look, I can give you some topical gags for the script.’
“Henry V does seem very filmic to me. It has real rip-roaring quality to it. And it seems to me that the injunction that the Chorus makes is as true of the film medium as it is of the stage. Like, ‘Please forget that you’re in a movie theater in Houston, and imagine you’re at Agincourt…’”
