It was a box-office hit directed by John Gielgud and created turmoil on stage and off. Now, the 1964 Broadway staging has inspired The Motive and the Cue, a new play by Jack Thorne
In 1964 Richard Burton played Hamlet on Broadway in a modern-dress production directed by John Gielgud. By commercial standards, it was a roaring success: it ran for 17 weeks, breaking a record previously held by Gielgud himself, and was packed out every night. But, for many of those involved, it was not a happy experience. And that is the subject of a new play by Jack Thorne, The Motive and the Cue, which starts previewing at the National Theatre in April, directed by Sam Mendes with Johnny Flynn as Burton, Mark Gatiss as Gielgud and Tuppence Middleton as Elizabeth Taylor, who had married Burton during the production’s Toronto tryout and whose offstage presence was a source of permanent distraction.
There are endless testimonies as to the tensions caused by the production. Melvyn Bragg in Rich, his Burton biography, reveals how the actor felt so unprepared that before the first performance he summoned his mentor and surrogate father, Philip Burton, to Toronto to privately take him through the text. Gielgud later lamented: “The American cast did not understand very much of what I was trying to do. All they wanted was motivation.” Best of all is Letters from an Actor by William Redfield, the production’s Guildenstern, in which, while sympathetic to Burton and Gielgud, he says: “Between the two men there is an artistic disagreement, an aesthetic split. It is a fundamental difference of both belief and technique.” All of which suggests Thorne has plenty to get his teeth into.
