Last but by no means least. The final major opening of the year, the West End transfer from the National Theatre of Jack Thorne’s The Motive and the Cue, is a rapier-witted and stirring love-letter to theatre, and to Hamlet, and to two of the play’s most notable 20th-century exponents – John Gielgud and Richard Burton, the pair coming together (and figuratively coming to blows) in 1964 to mount a Broadway production that broke box-office records.
Gielgud had triumphantly and definitively identified himself with the part in his prime; his role here, at 60, was to be directorial midwife to a modish “final rehearsal” interpretation – Burton’s second stab at the Prince. In the creative tussle between the two titans – Gielgud quaintly steeped in every line, Burton seeking new terrain but unsure of the route – there emerges something like a fraught father-son dynamic, which will, in its Hamletian intensity, finally unlock the production and the performance. Far from being a footnote, Thorne’s play artfully holds a mirror up to the mysteries of rehearsal, and life, and redoubles Hamlet’s preoccupation with performance, ghosts and lineage, the handing-on of the challenge to “act”, the gazing at mortality and the glimpses of infinity.
Transplanting it to the Noël Coward gives it an added ethereal frisson – and not just on account of the songs, warbled by “the Master”, that archly open each half. Over the river from his rival Larry’s NT, it was here – in 1934, when it was “the New” – that Gielgud dazzled London as the Dane. That nugget of information is relayed as part of fleeting projections that help keep tabs on the chronology of vignettes, as the clock ticks towards opening night, with front-of-cloth excerpts conjuring more palpably the Shakespearean endeavour.
Ideally, there’d be yet more context; the media circus and public hysteria that attended the production, not least on account of Burton having his new wife, Elizabeth Taylor, in tow, aren’t depicted. Thorne and director Sam Mendes cloister the action in a high-windowed rehearsal space, back-rooms, hotel suites and a bare stage. To the uninitiated, especially, it might seem too-too hermetic.
Yet the sheer fascination of the story and the potency of the leads ensure misgivings melt, thaw and resolve themselves into a dew. Gatiss, giving the performance of his career, eerily summons the spirit, at once humble and haughty, professorial and playful, genteel and prickly, of Gielgud: every detail, from involuntarily mouthing lines to a spasm of prim, sobbing loneliness in the arms of a rent boy, is spot-on.
Contrasting with his sonorous diction, Johnny Flynn’s handsome Burton is a recognisable, rasping figure of volatile egotism and booze-addled charm, squinting in bemusement, bridling at too many steers, brooding in ways suggestive of demons that not even the ministrations of Tuppence Middleton’s cool, glamorous, casually perceptive Liz can exorcise. The men’s 11th hour becalmed rapprochement, side by side, as Burton tackles “To be or not to be” entails a quality of pure, shiver-making revelation. The next stop – an essential homecoming, as ’twere – must be New York.
Until March 23; themotiveandthecue.com
