Starry British Cast Brings Shakespeare to the Airwaves : Radio review: As part of the UK/LA Festival, KCRW-FM broadcasts Kenneth Branagh’s productions of “Hamlet” and “King Lear” today and Sunday.

Most of us have never heard a Shakespeare play broadcast over the radio, let alone performed by a celestial gathering of British actors, including Kenneth Branagh, Emma Thompson and Sir John Gielgud.

Now, as part of the UK/LA Festival, “Hamlet” and “King Lear,” accompanied by fuller texts than usually employed in stage and screen adaptations, illuminate KCRW-FM (89.9) today and Sunday.

Both classics, which Branagh produced for the BBC and co-directed with Glyn Dearman, achieve what no live or filmed Shakespeare can match: The experience not only compels you to imagine your own images but also drowns you, happily, in the Bard’s rich tide of language.

The aural sensation, enlivened by such actors as Derek Jacobi, Dame Judi Dench and Bob Hoskins, is quite different from merely seeing the plays.

There’s nothing stuffy or waxen about these radio recordings. Branagh and Dearman have filled the air with moody music and haunting sound effects--searing rain, moaning winds and clashing sabers. They are creased with screams and madness--as in Branagh’s “transformations” and unsettling jibberish as the anguished Hamlet.

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On one level, “Hamlet” and “Lear” make good radio bookends, full as they are of “bloody, carnal and unnatural acts.”

But as radio plays, particularly for listeners roughly familiar with the texts (the “Hamlet” production is based on the first Folio), the travail in Denmark’s Elsinore castle is much easier to follow as you settle down and pour yourself a cup of tea.

That’s because “Hamlet’s” classic dramatic unities of time, place and action play much better over the air than the meandering “Lear’s” extreme polarities and double plot.

As for real-life drama, Gielgud’s King Lear was recorded to mark the actor’s 90th birthday and may well be his final statement on the old king who touches greatness after a humiliating banishment. His raspy rages catch the vanity, folly and reconciliation of the woeful Lear.

* “King Lear” airs 1-5 p.m. today on KCRW-FM (89.9); “Hamlet” airs 1-5 p.m. Sunday.