★★★★☆ Sam Mendes Directs Jack Thorne’s Take on Gielgud Directing Burton
by David Finkle
In 1964 Richard Burton played Hamlet for a second time, this go directed by John Gielgud at New York City’s Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. Guildenstern was played by William Redfield, who later wrote at some length about the production, his surveillance now out of print.
Nudged by Redfield’s recollections, Jack Thorne, who won both The Olivier and the Tony awards for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, has used it for The Motive and the Cue, an outstanding drama incorporating much comedy. His take on the proceedings, which included the presence of Burton’s new wife (their first marriage), Elizabeth Taylor, demonstrates that Thorne could just as well have called this work Sir John Gielgud and the Cursed Child.
The cursed child this outing is Burton himself, who behaved badly throughout the rehearsal period, arguing in various tempers, at least one while soused, with Gielgud over their interpretation of the classic role, a role that by 1964 Gielgud had played to international acclaim something like 300 times. (Some place that statistic at around 500.)
Reviewer’s full disclosure: I saw the production, which turned into Broadway’s longest-running Hamlet, and was mightily impressed by it, presented as if a final rehearsal, with Burton in black shirt and trousers and the other actors also in rehearsal duds.
What I wasn’t privy to were the rehearsals for this rehearsal take, which did reap some titillating behind-the-scenes coverage in gossip columns. After all, it was a production that Gielgud agreed to direct only because, as Thorne has him saying (quoting from Redfield?) “it was the best offer I had in some time.”
What Thorne exposes to audiences several times are sequences during which Burton (Johnny Flynn) and Gielgud (Mark Gatiss) lock horns, the most disturbing conflict a drunken outburst Burton performs before the entire cast, a diatribe so nasty that Eileen Herlie (Janie Dee) is moved to indulge a not entirely lady-like action.
Other scenes between the men could be considered folies á deux, the eventually successful encounter one in which Gielgud discusses his father and contrives to have Burton discuss his father. Gielgud introduces it by questioning Burton’s about Hamlet’s actual feelings about his deceased father.
Gielgud’s inspired notion is that this revival could be interpreted as being a father-son drama. He says, “Dear boy, have you considered, could it be – that your Hamlet does not like his father.” The heart-to-heart results in Burton’s reciting the “To be or not to be” soliloquy such that Gielgud responds, “And that is a Hamlet I have never seen.”
And this is a Hamlet, played by Flynn as Burton. It’s Flynn delivering Burton’s “To be or not to be.“ Earlier Gatiss as Gielgud gets his excellent licks in as Gielgud delivering Hamlet’s speech to the actors. There are not sufficient encomia to lay on these two actors, whose impersonations are perfect. Perfect means their replications of the actors’ often thought inimitable voices – two of the greatest voices ever heard from a modern stage – are exact.
Though these formidable two carry most of the Motive and the Cue, there are many other cues for acting passion that Thorne includes. Not the least of which is Taylor (Tuppence Middleton), who not only humorously hands Gielgud a key to dealing with her groom but is depicted as a woman aware of a husband’s potential divorceable faults.
Sam Mendes – leading a first-rate cast (Dee, Middleton, Alan Corduner as Hume Cronyn) on Es Devlin’s several helpful sets – adds this production to his list of directorial achievements. He renders his entire production the motive and cue for wide-spread attendance. If there is one abiding question of the proceedings, it’s whether audiences can rely on its complete accuracy. But surely, it’s close enough for immense satisfaction.
★★★★☆ Dissecting Gielgud and Burton Is Both Motive and Cue
by Bob Verini
In general, huzzahs to Jack Thorne’s highly entertaining The Motive and the Cue, so stylishly directed at London’s National Theatre by Sam Mendes and brilliantly acted by Mark Gatiss and Johnny Flynn. A moment might be profitably spent sorting out its sources and bona fides.
This re-creation of the smash 1964 Broadway revival of Hamlet takes advantage of the fact that its rehearsal period was one of the most exhaustively chronicled ever. In Letters From an Actor – one of the all-time great theater books; please obtain and read or reread it immediately – the witty character actor William Redfield regales us with tales in and out of the rehearsal room, along with his keen, inquisitive musings on the art of acting and his difficulties in getting his head around the meh role of Guildenstern. (He wanted Laertes, which went to John Cullum, Burton’s pal from Camelot.)
At the same time, eschewing generalizations and gossip, young company member Richard Sterne’s notations on everything he could glean would be published under the truth-in-advertising title John Gielgud Directs Richard Burton in “Hamlet,” in service of which Sterne once crept under the stage to eavesdrop on a private session between director and star. (Shades of Hamlet; he’s lucky he wasn’t hiding behind an arras.)
Thorne cobbles liberally from both credited sources, grabbing anecdotes and one-liners and incidents hither and yon. They’re often ascribed to different people, and who cares about that; it’s artistic license. But the license taken in the portraits of, and conflict between, Gielgud and Burton raises some interesting, not to say troublesome questions.
Seeking to present both men “in full,” Thorne infuses them with a dizzying amount of angst. In this telling, Gielgud (Gatiss) is an aged has-been riding on a 30-year-old reputation, worried about where his next job is coming from and still brooding over his arrest for male solicitation a decade before. Burton (Flynn) is already well on his way to becoming one of Graham Greene’s burnt-out cases, having abandoned the stage for Hollywood glamour and coin and recently (and famously) wed to his Cleopatra co-star Elizabeth Taylor (Tuppence Middleton). This Shakespearean role is presented as a last-gasp attempt to preserve his rep as a serious actor before drink and regret swallow him up.
Thorne locates the production’s crisis in Burton’s resentment that his director seems to be trying to push him into his, Gielgud’s, own (more effete, less vigorous) performance as the Melancholy Dane. Burton agonizes that he’s inadequate to the role’s challenges, while Sir John agonizes about how to get through to his tempestuous star. In the end, both men find a way to work out the interpretation. Reconciliation and champagne all around; Hamlet’s still got it.
Thorne’s portrait of Taylor is probably the most on-target. She did give up a lot of film work to offer Burton full-time moral support, and does seem to have interceded to rally the company together with tact and common sense. Middleton conveys the actress’s complicated mix of sensitive interpreter and bawdy wench that so intrigued Burton and, let’s face it, the rest of the Western World.
As for the other leads, Flynn has so accurately captured Burton’s voice and lurching manner, and Gatiss every aspect of Gielgud’s sound, physicality, and sense of style, that some of Motive’s more questionable license may be taken as fact.
Gielgud’s problems as a director – widely reported by other actors who’d worked with him and documented by Redfield and Sterne – stemmed from his refusal to stick with anything: Blocking approved one day would be arbitrarily discarded the next, and actors were baffled by impenetrable notes, mysterious suggestions and light putdowns Redfield calls “ham-on-wry.” You can understand how Thorne might downplay all of that esoterica in favor of the much more dramatic presentation of an icon on the outs; and to be fair, Gielgud did have a penchant for wearing all his emotions on his sleeve. But he was a much more dynamic, articulate, self-possessed expert than comes across in this telling.
Burton emerges even less well. Certainly he had a deserved reputation as a carouser, and certainly Redfield describes many bibulous nights in the star’s dressing room after hours. But when at work, the evidence is there of a truly serious artist, smart as a whip, trying hard to reconcile his working-class background and natural aggressive energy with the sensitive, reflective Danish prince.
Thorne alludes to that dilemma, while inventing shockingly unprofessional behavior to suggest quite a different story of a once-promising talent succumbing to despair. Of all the invention in The Motive and the Cue, I was most disturbed by the melodramatic climax of act one, when Burton shows up pissed and abusive for a rehearsal of the Player King scene. He pushes Scotch and sodas on one and all, refused by Gielgud with an icy “I am a professional” that prompts a homophobic mocking of Gielgud’s Hamlet. The company scurries away, Gielgud is left to perform the speech to the players in sad soliloquy, and we’re left to wonder: Can this production be salvaged?
One gets why Thorne has set it up this way – it’s dramatic as hell, and makes you want to rush back after the interval – but one hopes it won’t be mistaken for a literal event. For this project, Burton hand-picked the man who had directed him in Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not for Burning, and by all accounts saw him as a mentor and indispensable ally. Burton did do a wicked Gielgud (he was a brilliant mimic), but the notion that he’d be in his cups and attack the great man with it, at work and in public, is preposterous. (Redfield recounts an instance of Burton, in drama school, not realizing that Gielgud was standing behind him as he did his impression. “Generally speaking,” Sir John frostily commented, “veddy good mimics do not become veddy good actors.”) Later, the discovery of each man’s father/son issues, leading to agreement on how Burton should attack Hamlet, seems too simplistic and sentimental for words. It does and will “play” for audiences. But do the two men – now of course gone from us – deserve better?
That question will be hotly debated as the sold-out National Theatre run is followed by a West End transfer in December. And no one should bet against its coming to New York, followed by a world tour and movie version. All of the above will prompt much reconsideration of the 1964 production (preserved, if shakily, in a video transcription and a more-than-worthwhile complete cast recording ) as well as the careers of Gielgud and Burton, and probably Taylor as well, and that is all to the good.
I myself expect to revisit The Motive and the Cue with pleasure, though right now I want to plunge back into Redfield and Sterne to recall what really happened: less melodramatic, for sure, but more nuanced and useful for anyone who cares about the art form. In assessing the accuracy of Thorne’s work, perhaps one should paraphrase the tag line from Guys and Dolls, which is also playing here in London, and simply deem it “a non-musical fable of Broadway.”
The Motive and the Cue opened April 21, 2023, at the National/Lyttelton (London) and runs through July 15. Tickets and information: nationaltheatre.org.uk
The production will reopen December 9, 2023, at the Noël Coward Theatre (London) and run through March 23, 2024. Tickets and information: nationaltheatre.org.uk