Sunday Mirror (Northern Ireland)
THE MOTIVE AND THE CUE
★★★★ Lyttelton Theatre, London, until July 15, nationaltheatre.org.uk
It’s a dazzling prospect: Sam Mendes directing Mark Gatiss, Johnny Flynn and Tuppence Middleton as John Gielgud, Richard Burton and
Elizabeth Taylor, based on eyewitness records of the male stars’ tumultuous relationship during their legendary
1964 Hamlet on Broadway.
Burton was 39, a working-class Welshman crackling with electrifying raw talent, and the biggest star on the planet, partly thanks to his recent marriage to Taylor.
Gielgud was 60, an aristocratic craftsman who had played every great stage role by 30 but was no longer in demand. The acknowledged Hamlet of his era, he finds himself despairingly directing a man who is his opposite.
The play is a series of elegant vignettes, snapshots of explosive rehearsals interspersed with excerpts from Hamlet, alongside glimpses of Taylor and Burton’s lavish honeymoon suite and Gielgud’s drab rooms.
Jack Thorne’s script delivers waspish exchanges as the men embody the clash between the hallowed old and exciting new. As mutual resentment and respect battle for dominance, Gielgud delivers delicious cuts couched as compliments – “You shout wonderfully,” he purrs – before it builds to a moving but manipulative catharsis.
Flynn impressively captures Burton’s idiosyncratic rhythms and his bombast, powerfully contrasted with glimpses of the childhood that torments him and
drives his greatness. Middleton is a strong presence but never captures Taylor’s charisma or wicked feline allure.
The crowning glory is Gatiss. Everyone else is performing while he simply is. It’s spinetingling. Not just capturing Gielgud’s sumptuous sound, he aches with a melancholy awareness that his own abilities remain but their time may have passed.
Inner pain peeks through with almost unbearable pathos. In an exquisitely moving scene, a male escort pierces Gielgud’s deflecting wit and steely poise, understanding that he just needs to be held, and he sobs in the stranger’s arms.
Ultimately, though, this is a passionate love letter to the stage and to the beauty of language.
The superb cast savour every line so wonderfully, it almost disguises the fact that the play is all smoke and mirrors – gorgeous artifice with not quite enough substance. But it’s gloriously entertaining all the same.