The Motive and the Cue

Well this is a play for theatre geeks if ever I saw one.  We missed the cheap tickets when they were first released and so grabbed these seats when they came up as returns.   Written by Jack Thorne (who also wrote When Winston Went to War With The Wireless, currently at The Donmar), the story is based around the rehearsal period for the 1964 production of Hamlet starring the newly married Richard Burton, directed by John Gielgud. 

I am just a sucker for any version of Hamlet anyway, so I loved the whole thing, combining chunks of the play, mixed with the rehearsal process alongside homages to theatre, using Burton’s struggles to find ‘his Hamlet’ as the guiding thread.  The battles between Gielgud (Mark Gatiss) and Burton (Johnny Flynn) are as entertaining as they are enlightening, with their conflict between the old and new eventually creating something different.   There’s a bit of a look of the biography of the protagonists too which shows the feedback loop between artist and their work and so feeds beautifully into their rehearsal room stances.  There are some great set pieces and ensemble performances in the first half, weaving parts of the play in rehearsal with what is happening in the protagonists real lives.  The second half has soliloquies from the leads, both of them hitting the spot.   Mark Gatiss is really impressive as Gielgud, the old guard reluctantly giving way to the modern.  And I enjoyed Flynn’s performance of the lines in different ways, trying out which Hamlet was his. 

At the end there were a few statistics displayed on screen, one of which was that 200,000 different actors have played Hamlet.  I have seen a few and none has ever been the same, so it begs the question are there an infinite variety of Hamlets?  

Anyway, an entertaining few hours reflecting on the things that theatre is about, and on the process that creates it.  It’s both funny and moving and I found it completely gripping from beginning to end. I highly recommend that all theatre geeks get themselves along to the Lyttleton or get tickets for the upcoming West End transfer.