Hello friends.
On Tuesday evening of this week, I went to London to see The Motive and the Cue. The play centres on the tumultuous relationship between stage legends John Gielgud and Richard Burton as they rehearse for their record-shattering run of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Burton has taken on the central role while Gielgud directs him (and says he will give his off-stage ghost of Old Hamlet “if the company will have me”). Meanwhile, in the present production, the roles of Burton and Gielgud themselves fall to Johnny Flynn and Mark Gatiss.
I will confess upfront that I am something of a neophyte when it comes to live theatre. The majority of the plays I’ve seen have been on television, laptop or cinema screens. Past live performances I have seen include: an amateur production of Fiddler on the Roof, the Shrewsbury pantomime, a Romeo and Juliet musical, my cousin’s secondary school production of Les Misérables, RSC’s The Duchess of Malfi (2018) and (mostly) school productions of other things. I have been on the stage in some school productions, but my acting career really peaked at fourteen when I played Stanhope in R.C. Sherrif’s Journey’s End. My next role, Phil in Dennis Kelly’s DNA, marked the beginning of my waning enthusiasm for acting.
So, with those rather thin credentials laid bare, I want to tell you quite simply what I thought about The Motive and the Cue. Perhaps my lack of theatre experience will not hinder me too much in this task because at least the novelty of seeing a play (in London no less) will likely never feel quotidian to me. If to some I seem easily pleased, perhaps that’s just understandable.
One thing I do have is a familiarity with Hamlet. I have read and watched it (though never live) lots of times and it was an A-Level English set text of mine. So, the premise of The Motive and the Cue was already quite exhilarating to me. I hoped I might gain a deeper understanding of the play based on the rehearsal scenes, but I didn’t account for the fact that I would come to appreciate Shakespeare’s language so much more when spoken live. Theatre is, according to Gatiss’s Gielgud “pure thought”. Indeed, at one point, he urges Burton – in response to his dual tendencies towards shouting and hurried murmuring – to “let the thoughts come”. Something about being in the space with the actors meant that the snippets from Hamlet came alive for me in a way that they haven’t done since I first saw Rory Kinnear play the role in the cinema in 2010.
This idea of theatre as thought is very interesting to me. Because the visual is so limited on the stage (as compared, say, with a film) the dialogue acquires greater importance. The ability to write characters with distinctive voices is, in a sense, a form of voice hearing. Until you can hear the qualities of a character’s voice (cadence, pitch, speed etc.), it will be hard to give them life, to make them stand apart. Similarly, the imaginative powers required to generate conflict within scenes and dialogue come in no small part from spinning thoughts around in one’s head. To be able to see a thing from a multiplicity of views and express each of these views with an unjudging honesty and a robustness which cause the audience to weigh them up sincerely… therein lies the intelligence of the writer.
Luckily for the audience of The Motive and the Cue, this ability extends from Shakespeare all the way to Jack Thorne. Even though Thorne writes no soliloquies of his own, his text is thought-filled and layered with competing viewpoints. That said, the pacy dialogue was initially slightly off-putting; I found it took me about five minutes to adjust to the music of it. But I want to venture that this was 1) not a flaw and 2) perhaps even deliberate on Thorne’s part. Consider the opening lines of Hamlet:
SCENE I. Elsinore. A platform before the castle.
FRANCISCO at his post. Enter to him BERNARDOBERNARDO
Who's there?FRANCISCO
Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself.BERNARDO
Long live the king!FRANCISCO
Bernardo?BERNARDO
He.FRANCISCO
You come most carefully upon your hour.BERNARDO
'Tis now struck twelve; get thee to bed, Francisco.[…]
What do we learn from these lines? Well, we’re initially, quite literally, in the dark. Bernardo can hear Francisco but can’t see him clearly. The lines are staccato and, though packed with information, also quite sparse. We are made to scrabble around for a sense of just what is going on and to generate meaning piece by piece.
In my view, the same is true of the opening of The Motive and the Cue. We open on the day of the first readthrough and so, in fact, we hear the very lines quoted above. But, before that we have to learn about our characters, see how they behave to each other. Unlike Hamlet, the main players are present from the start (and everyone can see each other). Flynn’s performance choices (the way he lounges in his chair, his physical way of throwing his head back in peals of laughter) teach us a lot about Burton as a man. Simultaneously, we learn from Gatiss much about the sort of man Gielgud was. He is intimidating but trying his best to set the room at ease, highly disciplined and serious, but perhaps lacking in the confidence of his youth at sixty years old. If the central point of the ghost’s appearance in Hamlet’s opening scene is to establish that all may not be well at Elsinore, the tensions established in the opening of The Motive and the Cue perform this same task of destabilisation.
As stated, the actor’s physicality does much of the work for us, but the feelings of bafflement I felt from listening to the opening dialogue also tracked rather nicely onto feelings of apprehension during a first rehearsal. I was keen to absorb everything that everyone was saying and found I couldn’t. Like the nervous actors keen to glean all they could from Gielgud, I was desperate to savour and chew over all the meaning I could from Thorne’s words. In trying to miss nothing, I ended up overwhelmed. It wasn’t until an impromptu speech from Burton about his hopes for the production which was, in its way, pompous and overreaching, that I started to relax a little and sense the dynamics at play. The pacy, witty dialogue before this speech had felt rather like those opening lines of Hamlet, full of information (which must have forced the audience to quieten down in c.1601), but also asking so many questions at once as to be unsettling.
After the relationship between Burton and Gielgud had been established, it remained the focus of the play from then on. Once Burton’s speech had set the stakes, the energy of the play came from the pair’s clashing. Even when Burton went home to his wife, Elizabeth Taylor (Tuppence Middleton), their conversations were largely about the play and the ongoing power struggle of the rehearsals. The interest of this subject matter was, like all Shakespearean drama, familial. Not only because Burton’s then wife played a large role, but also because Gielgud fills a patriarchal gap for Burton. It wasn’t until both men had solved the issues at the heart of Hamlet’s relationship to his father, and in the process been vulnerable about their feelings towards their own fathers, that they were able to reach a reconciliation and go ahead with the production. It was in hearing these stories that I started to feel the deepest sympathies for Burton and that his previous behaviours started to make sense. Only when Burton was this honest about his own ill feelings towards his father was Gielgud able to connect with him and, in the process, suggest the great guiding principle of their production: that Hamlet also saw his father as weak. All this was rather like (I imagine) sitting in on a therapy session for someone you find exasperating. You would see then what you didn’t know they had been struggling to overcome.
I rarely like the fiction or media I consume to have anything so clumsy as a “message”, but perhaps this willingness to be vulnerable is a sort of message to the audience of Thorne’s play. Flynn’s performance was so rich with detail and verisimilitude that I found Burton more interesting and complex than unlikeable. In fact, it was Gielgud who seemed to have the greater capacity for cutting remarks. Burton was brattish in his behaviour and revelled in mocking Gielgud, certainly, but it was the latter who, when driven to his wit’s end, could be calmly, quite unapologetically cruel at times. Gatiss was excellent at making such moments hang in the air unpleasantly, evoking gasps or nervous laughter. He also had (paradoxically?) by far the most comic role in the play, both situationally and in terms of dialogue. Given the part of “the classicist who wants to be modern” meant that Gatiss could be by turns infuriatingly uptight, bewilderingly old-fashioned and then, without warning, shockingly frank.
During a central scene in the play, Gielgud compares the way a speech of Hamlet’s rises in tension to the build-up of Zadok The Priest by Handel. The speech in question, “rogue and peasant slave” is one which I have watched Burton speak a number of times. The trademarks of his performance were all there in Flynn’s delivery. If Gielgud really did give a note about doing the speech like Handel’s piece, it was not noted. But that really just shows—quite beautifully—the differences between the two characters and their two Hamlets. Gielgud—who performed his Hamlet back in the 1920s—full of doubt, full of mounting rage but only letting it show occasionally (“O, vengeance!”). And then Burton—fired up by his alcoholism and his repressed fury at his own father—shouting and murmuring and wholly modern, filled with more of Rite of Spring than of Zadok.