More than 40 years after his star-making performance as Henry V in Stratford-upon-Avon, Kenneth Branagh is to return to the Royal Shakespeare Company. He will appear in The Tempest and, alongside Oscar winner Helen Hunt, in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard at the RSC next summer.
Branagh, 64, began to build a reputation as one of the greatest Shakespearean actors of his generation when he played Henry V, aged 23, in a 1984 season that included roles as Laertes in Hamlet and the King of Navarre in Love’s Labour’s Lost. The following year he wrote and directed the play Tell Me Honestly for the RSC. Branagh went on to both direct and star in acclaimed Shakespeare productions during an illustrious stage and screen career that has included breaking an Oscars record as the first person to be nominated in seven individual Academy Award categories. The Tempest will mark his first role for the RSC since he played Hamlet in 1992 and 1993 (first at the Barbican in London and then in Stratford), directed by Adrian Noble.
The Guardian’s Michael Billington, who predicted “a rich Shakespearean future for this young actor” in his review of Henry V, wrote that in the role of Hamlet, Branagh captured, “as well as any actor I recall, a deep sense of filial love”. He continued: “This is a fine Hamlet, stamped with rueful sadness, that should dispel any doubt about Branagh’s staying power.”
Kenneth Branagh in the film Henry V in 1989. Photograph: AJ Pics/Alamy
The Tempest was the first play Branagh saw as an audience member in Stratford, when he sat in the gods for a 1978 production starring Michael Hordern, David Suchet, Alan Rickman and Ruby Wax. In 2012, wearing a top hat in character as the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Branagh delivered a speech by Caliban from The Tempest (“the isle is full of noises”) at the opening ceremony for the Olympic Games in London. He will now take on the part of the magician Prospero, who gives the famous “Our revels now are ended” speech, in what is billed as an “epic new staging” of the shipwreck drama directed by Richard Eyre and with a set design by Bob Crowley. The Tempest begins previews on 13 May in the Royal Shakespeare theatre.
It will be followed, in the smaller Swan theatre, by The Cherry Orchard, which opens in July. Branagh will play Lopakhin alongside Hunt as Madame Ranevskaya in a new version of the play by Laura Wade and directed by Tamara Harvey, who runs the RSC with Daniel Evans. Wade and Harvey are frequent collaborators and recently teamed up for a new version of Somerset Maugham’s The Constant Wife in Stratford. Hunt, who played Viola in Twelfth Night on Broadway in 1998, was last on stage in the UK in Eureka Day at the Old Vic in 2022.
Joanne Pearce as Ophelia and Kenneth Branagh as Hamlet at the Barbican theatre, London, in 1992. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian
Mark Gatiss will also appear with the RSC next year, making his debut for the company in the lead role of a Chicago mobster, modelled on Hitler, in Bertolt Brecht’s political satire The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Stephen Sharkey’s version of the play will be directed by Seán Linnen in the Swan from April to May. Gatiss called it “Brecht’s most accessible and dynamic work … The play is always timely but to say it’s urgent now is an understatement. With fascism on the march everywhere, the story of how a washed-up nonentity like Hitler could seduce a nation and become the most powerful dictator in the world serves as a terrifying warning.”
The RSC’s spring season includes, in the Other Place (its third stage in Stratford), actor Martina Laird’s debut as a playwright, Driftwood, about capitalism and colonialism in Trinidad. The play, which was the runner-up for the 2024 Verity Bargate award, will be directed by Justin Audibert and will transfer to the Kiln theatre in London. Also in the Other Place, Rachel Bagshaw will stage a new version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, edited by Robin Belfield, that will move to Stratford after its run at the Unicorn theatre in London.