Financial Times, 18 July 2003
by Alastair Macauley

**Thanks, Catherine

He's half James Cagney and he's half Rupert Bear, and, like Dolly, he, Kenneth Branagh, is back where he belongs: on stage. In the title role of David Mamet's 'Edmond' in the National Theatre's Travelex £10 Olivier season, you certainly get to see him. During the play's 75 minutes, he's seldom offstage for more than a few seconds. He's violent and vulnerable, he's a murderer who feels that he's a victim, he travels a large arc through the modern world at its harshest and ends up tender. The protagonist of an existential drama to be mentioned alongside Camus's novel 'L'Etranger' and the most disturbing plays of Harold Pinter, 'Edmond' is an exceptional role.

But Branagh's greatest virtue lies in another level of his interpretative gifts: for utterance. Last year, when he played Richard III in Sheffield in his first British stage performance in 10 years, he spoke the lines as if he had a hot line to Shakespeare and as if he was dropping the words in your inner ear. Now he brings the same powerful strength of diction to Mamet, the playwright for whom rhythm becomes drama.

Branagh plays the role's first short phrases like ping-pong and like the ideal leader of a string quartet. Then, when the short phrases come pell-mell, he effortlessly hurls them out in long legato torrent of staccato syllables. His phrasing reaches its climax in a moment of virtual breakdown. Asked to explain his reason for a senseless murder, he calls out isolated, clenched syllables such as separate, maximum-tension chords: "I - Don't - Think - I - Don't..."

'Edmond' is the always tough Mamet at his toughest, making drama without a hint of charm, fiercely riveting us with the heartless blast of modern urban life, making us laugh largely by absurdity and irony, achieving pathos only by what he leaves unsaid. Edward Hall directs; though I never knew he could manage such a sparse, rhythmical, abrasive and gripping production. Amid the large cast, Carol Macready, Nicola Walker, Adam Levy and Nonso Anozie are outstanding. But it is the union of Branagh and Edmond that fills your head long after the play: modern man on the rack, at odds with the world and himself, searching for meaning in the dark and in despair.

Five stars (out of 5)