Breaking Baz: Kenneth Branagh & Helen Hunt Bring Star Power To Royal Shakespeare Company In ‘The Tempest’ & ‘The Cherry Orchard’

Kenneth Branagh, a titan of the stage, returns to his Royal Shakespeare Company roots for the first time in more than three decades next year to star as Prospero in The Tempest, directed by Richard Eyre, and he will join Oscar-winning Helen Hunt, making her RSC debut, in Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.

The Tempest will run from May 13-June 20 at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Following that, Hunt will play Madame Ranyevskaya, the childishly grand but impoverished aristocrat who returns to what once was her family’s estate, with Branagh taking on the role of Lopakhin, the trader whose descendants were serfs on the land he now owns, in director Tamara Harvey’s production of The Cherry Orchard, using a new adaptation by Laura Wade.

It moves into The Swan Theatre, on the banks of the Avon, from July 10-August 29.

The new RSC season actually will begin with Mark Gatiss starring in Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, in a new version by Stephen Sharkey that’s set in Chicago’s rat-a-tat gangster era. Director Seán Linnen’s production will play the Swan Theatre from April 11 to May 30. Gatiss (Wolf Hall, Sherlock, Game of Thrones) also makes his RSC debut. The actor has won two Olivier Awards for roles in Three Days in the Country and The Motive and the Cue, both at the National Theatre. 

It’s a juicy, starry season for co- artistic directors Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey, who were appointed two years ago to jointly run the prestigious arts organization.

Hunt (Hacks), who won her Best Actress Academy Award for As Good as It Gets, tells Deadline that she has “imagined” the RSC as her “sort of a North Star my whole life.”

While Hunt has not, thus far, graced the RSC’s boards, she nonetheless is familiar with its work, having sought out the voice and text expertise of Cicely Berry and John Barton, two of the greatest influences in the acting of Shakespeare, when she was preparing to play Viola in Nicholas Hytner’s production of Twelfth Night at the Vivian Beaumont in 1998.

The Mad About You star says that she has been a “fan and an actor” looking to the RSC “for all the history and all the good ways to act Shakespeare.”

She jokes that opportunity to be in The Cherry Orchard “was sort of wheeled to my front door, like a giant delicious layer cake. It had this beautiful play of all plays at the bottom. It had the RSC, it had on top of that Tamara, who I immediately adored, and then this weather system of talent in the body of Kenneth Branagh. … I looked over my shoulder thinking, ‘I just get to do this?!’”

Her response was to say “yes, with the proper amount of trepidation in terms of an actor’s desire not to ruin a play by being bad. And there’s a line in Chekhov’s The Seagull where Nina says: ‘You have no idea what it feels like to be acting when you know it’s bad.’ And I always think of that when I started something challenging, and all actors don’t want to be bad.”

Calling The Cherry Orchard an “incredible play,” she reveals that she didn’t know it was well as Uncle Vanya, “so I’m kind of trying to get my little degree here in all things The Cherry Orchard.”

Hunt tells us that she’s seen a couple of productions of The Cherry Orchard that “honestly weren’t exactly to my liking,” but she sees that as an advantage because “I don’t have another performance or another production that I have to push aside to make a relationship to this one.”

Over the past few years, Hunt says that she’s been given “really beautiful opportunities with some really beautiful theaters … that feels like some kind of predestined thing. I didn’t sit down and say I only wanted to play at the best theaters in the world, but that’s the thing that’s been handed me. And so I’m grabbing it as hard as I can.”

Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day at London’s Old Vic Theatre in 2022 marked the first time she’d performed on stage in the UK.

One happy memory of starring at the Old Vic, she says, is of ”brushing your teeth [in your dressing room] and the ghost of Peter O’Toole steps over your shoulder.”

Earlier this year she appeared with Robert Sean Leonard and Ian Barford in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal at the Goodman in Chicago.

Wistfully, she observes, that “sometimes you choose a career and sometimes you notice your career. And I’m noticing that these days you could live your whole life dreaming to work on these parts… and I’m really grateful.”

Recently, Hunt worked with filmmaker Peter Greenaway on new movie Lucca Mortiswith Dustin Hoffman. And, she tells us, “I’m on the brink of signing to do a romantic comedy in Austria,” ahead of rehearsals for The Cherry Orchard in May.

Branagh graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London in 1981, and was invited to join the RSC playing the title role in Henry V and roles in seven other plays for a two year stretch between 1984-5. The actor returned to the RSC in 1992 to play the Danish prince in Hamlet at the Barbican and at Stratford-upon-Avon.

Eyre (Notes on a Scandal, Iris,The Children Act) says he has known Branagh since just after he left RADA but they’ve never worked together. “Not for want of trying,” Eyre sighs. “Somehow the stars have never been aligned.”

He adds: “And I’m very,very thrilled that he’s going to play Prospero.”

Toying with the idea of directing The Tempest, Eyre chatted with Daniel Evans at the RSC because they’d become friendly after Eyre, who ran the National Theatre for ten years, staged plays for Evans when he ran the Chichester Festival Theatre. 

They talked about a few actors, says Eyre, “one of whom was Ken, and I was just thrilled that Ken was interested.”

The director sent Branagh “a sort of scenario for what I had in mind”  and “ it concurred with a lot of what he’d been thinking about in the play.”

It’s a play, as with most of Shakespeare’s works, that can be taken in 101 different directions.  

Eyre agreed. “And you somehow want to take all directions simultaneously and it’s because you can see it’s an allegory of colonialism and allegory of the creative mind, and you can see it as a play about revenge and about justice and power and freedom. So there are all these big subjects and I hope to open them all up.”

Eyre is once again collaborating with designer Bob Crowley. He says there will be a disc on the stage representing Prospero’s island. “ So it’s a world that sort of exists in the mind, but it’s a theater world, so there won’t be caves and palm trees, I can tell you that.“

He pointed me towards the RCS poster image of Branagh as Prospero.  “And I think it  gives a sense of where we’re going which is inside Prospero’s head, again metaphorically.”

Eyre last worked at the RSC half a century ago when he directed Charles Wood’s farce Jingo,with Michael Williams and Anna Massey,in 1975 at the Aldwych Theatre, which was then used as the RSC’s London base. The production,Eyres, confesses, “was a total disaster.” and he was never invited back,until now. “It was a wonderful cast  but it was a disaster. The play was sort of chaotic, but I chose to do it in a way that didn’t help the play.”

 He recalls being turned down for work at the RSC after having appeared before “a really frightening tribunal” made up of five directors interviewing him to see if he was suitable. “And I was found unsuitable,” he says chuckling.

However, he went off to run the Nottingham Playhouse Theatre  which was a huge success and he also began directing drama at the BBC.

He admits that the RSC  “tribunal experience left him feeling “a bit humiliated when I was turned down, but then I sort of felt a bit out of sympathy with them. When I was running Nottingham Playhouse, I was working with a lot of young actors,young writers, and we thought we were on top of the world. So I didn’t feel we had to defer to the Royal Shakespeare Company. So they probably saw me as very arrogant. Anyway, it didn’t work out that way, but I don’t feel I missed out.”

That’s all a very long time ago, he says now. “Anyway,” he laughs, “I’m very much looking forward to being there” to mount The Tempest with rehearsals starting towards the end of March.

Branagh, wasn’t available to chat with me because he’s busy in the U.S. filming The Devil Wears Prada 2 and the latest iteration of The Thomas Crown Affair.