When, one night in Manhattan, 1964, Truman Capote accepted a ride in Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s limousine after the theatre, the author wasn’t prepared to find himself at the centre of a mob scene. “Damp, ghostly faces were flattened against the car’s windows,” he wrote of the obsessive interest in the couple. “The whole scene was like a stilled avalanche nothing could budge.” The crowds would gather the following evening, and the one after that too; Burton, fresh from starring alongside Taylor in Cleopatra, had signed on to play Hamlet on Broadway, and pandemonium raged outside the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre.
It’s this fraught Shakespeare production – led by Burton, directed by West End titan John Gielgud, and underwritten by Taylor’s tangential involvement – that has inspired director Sam Mendes’s The Motive and the Cue. It marks the Oscar winner’s first return to the stage since 2018’s The Lehman Trilogy.
“For me, The Motive and the Cue tries to find answers to three questions,” Mendes says of the project’s allure. “Why would the era’s biggest movie star – Richard Burton – want to spend his honeymoon playing a role which has already been played by thousands of actors, while his new wife – Elizabeth Taylor – sits in a hotel room waiting for him to return? Why do we go back to these plays over and over, and what is the point of classical theatre at all? What goes on in a rehearsal room when you make theatre, and – if there is conflict – is that really such a bad thing?”
Written by Tony winner Jack Thorne, the piece examines the forces that made Burton’s Hamlet both a commercial triumph (with more than 200,000 tickets sold over a record-setting 136 performances) and an interpersonal disaster. In truth, the chaos outside the Lunt-Fontanne had nothing on the tumult backstage: Burton clashed bitterly with Gielgud over the staging ahead of opening night, with Taylor acting as go-between.
“He wanted to be thought of as [being] in the line of great actors like Gielgud,” explains Johnny Flynn, who stars as Burton, when we meet at Vogue’s photoshoot. “He’s hoping that by working with Sir John, he’ll become [like] that, but he’s instinctively not. He’s kind of like a wild animal, really.” Flynn, by contrast, is calm – reclining on a leather sofa next to Tuppence Middleton, set to play Taylor, and Mark Gatiss, the production’s campy, energetic Gielgud.
We’ve stolen 40 minutes between portraits, and the rehearsal-like atmosphere – everyone in monochrome, studio lights, Colorama scrolls – is fitting. Gielgud, at Burton’s suggestion, staged his Hamlet as if it were a final run-through, sans traditional costumes, props or backdrops – “quite a modern idea at the time”, says Flynn, and something Mendes references in his staging.
Despite being known for his work onscreen – including a turn as Mr Knightley opposite Anya Taylor-Joy in 2020’s Emma – Flynn is embedded in the world of theatre. His late father, an actor, used to play cricket with Mendes, while his wife, Beatrice Minns, is a designer for immersive drama company Punchdrunk. Like Burton in ’64, the 40-year-old’s star is in the ascendant. Last year, he spent more than eight months “rolling around Naples, the Amalfi and Rome” for Ripley, Steven Zaillian’s eight-part adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley novels, in which he stars as Dickie Greenleaf. “It’s a bit darker, a bit more wintry, than the 1999 film,” he teases of his outing as the toyboy heir opposite Dakota Fanning and Andrew Scott.
Yet Burton seems the sybarite Flynn is most excited to bring to life. “[Burton and Taylor] were famous in a way that hadn’t happened [before],” he reflects. Less than a month before opening night in New York, they married in a private hotel suite, Elizabeth pinning an emerald-and-diamond Bulgari brooch to her dress. The public’s fascination with the couple was at a fever pitch.
Inevitably, when rehearsals for Hamlet began, the level of intrigue among the cast rivalled that of the Danish court. The production’s Guildenstern, William Redfield, would later publish Letters from an Actor about the blow-ups he witnessed, while Richard L Sterne (playing the role of “Gentleman”) secreted a recording device into his briefcase to get material for his own tell-all. It was the discovery of these two books, both now out of print, that sparked Mendes’s idea for the production.
Making the situation even more volatile? The sheer volume of alcohol consumed during the run. “It blew my mind reading about just how much they drank,” admits Middleton. “Elizabeth would carry this cabinet with all the ingredients for a Bloody Mary wherever she went.” In person, the 36-year-old – recently seen in David Fincher’s Mank and who auditioned for The Motive and the Cue shortly after the birth of her first child – more closely resembles Taylor than I expected. To her mind, Elizabeth is the wisest character – summoning Gielgud to her room when tensions with Burton reach a breaking point. “She’s the one who’s able to make fun of herself and to call herself out – she knows what her life is.”
As for Gatiss, his prep for the role of Geilgud has involved a “certain physical transformation”, and listening to Gielgud’s 1941 Hamlet for the radio. Meanwhile, through his myriad West End connections, he “keeps bumping into people” who knew Gielgud personally. “I met somebody in Brasserie Zédel the other day who was in his last play. She said, ‘Oh, I knew Johnny. I recorded him in the dressing room, if you’d like to hear it?’”
Soon, a photographer’s assistant appears. The cast are needed back in wardrobe. Within a month, the three will be deep in rehearsals with Mendes, their every waking thought devoted to Hollywood supernovas and Shakespearean tragedy. I recall an earlier comment of Flynn’s: “There’s a point in the script when Redfield tries to justify why he’s chosen Hamlet over Hollywood, and he says: ‘I wanted to be near greatness – to be part of something great.’ That’s the thing with theatre: it’s ephemeral, and unless you’re there, in the room, you never get to witness that magic.”
The Motive and the Cue opens at the Noël Coward Theatre on 9 December.
Hair: Mark Francome Painter. Make-up: Verity Cumming. Nails: Ami Streets. Production: Diana Eastman. Set design: Josh Stovell. Digital artwork: The Hand of God
