Stage hit ‘The Motive and the Cue’ depicts a Hollywood golden couple. Now moviegoers can see it too
LONDON — The world has at all times liked a golden couple, particularly when there are hints of bother in paradise.
Many years earlier than hundreds of thousands tracked each transfer of Harry and Meghan, William and Kate or Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, it was the turbulent union of actors Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor that set gossip columns aflame.
“In a time when the world was a lot much less related, they have been like gods,” mentioned Mark Gatiss, who stars in “The Motive and the Cue,” successful play about Taylor and Burton of their Sixties heyday. “They actually have been. Folks hung off their each divorce.”
“The Motive and the Cue” has had two sellout runs in London and will likely be broadcast in cinemas in Britain and internationally beginning Thursday as a part of the Nationwide Theatre Dwell sequence.
The play charts the rocky creation of a now-legendary piece of theater, a 1964 Broadway manufacturing of “Hamlet” during which Burton performed William Shakespeare’s tormented prince. The manufacturing was a triumph, but it surely was virtually a catastrophe. Jack Thorne’s backstage drama depicts the tensions between Burton, performed by Johnny Flynn, and the play’s director, John Gielgud, performed by Gatiss. Tuppence Middleton types the third level within the central triangle as Taylor.
Directed by Sam Mendes — returning to his old flame, the theater, after a film-dominated interval that included James Bond thrillers “Skyfall” and “Spectre” — it is a witty and transferring have a look at fame’s fickleness and price. It exhibits Taylor and Burton basically confined to the gilded cage of their New York resort suite.
The brooding, velvet-voiced Burton was a megastar however craved creative credibility. Gielgud, a dashing main man within the Twenties and 30s, was, Gatiss mentioned, “utterly washed up.”
“Gielgud was a relic. He did this as a result of it was the very best supply he’d had in a very long time.”
The twist within the story got here within the years that adopted. Burton’s heavy ingesting blighted his profession, and he died in 1984 aged 58. Taylor additionally did her finest work when younger, married eight occasions — twice to Burton — and died in 2011.
Gielgud, in the meantime, had a profession renaissance that introduced Hollywood fame, an Academy Award — for enjoying Dudley Moore’s butler in “Arthur” — and the standing of elder statesman of British drama. He died beloved and lauded in 2000, aged 96.
Gielgud, Burton and Taylor are more and more figures from historical past, however the play has struck a chord even with audiences who don’t keep in mind them.
“I had two buddies come the opposite day — they’d by no means heard of any of the principals, extremely,” Gatiss mentioned throughout an interview in his dressing room on the Noel Coward Theatre. “However they bought it, due to what it’s about. It’s about fame, it’s about repute, it’s about legacy, it’s about fathers and sons.”
It’s additionally a love letter to the theater, particularly to “Hamlet,” which a caption on the finish of the play says has been performed by an astonishing 250,000 actors. Considered one of them was Gielgud, who carried out the function within the Nineteen Thirties in the identical West Finish theater the place “The Motive and the Cue” is operating till March 23.
That coincidence tickles Gatiss, an actor-writer-director who performed the nice detective’s brother, Mycroft Holmes, within the BBC TV sequence “ Sherlock,” which Gatiss created with Steven Moffatt.
He has received rave critiques, and an Olivier Award nomination, for his understated and transferring efficiency as Gielgud — “a mellifluous marvel,” in line with The Observer; “the efficiency of his profession” within the view of the Every day Telegraph.
If Gielgud was as soon as thought-about a relic, it’s Burton who now appears an icon of a vanished age — one during which a Welsh coal miner’s son like him may break into the appearing world.
Gatiss’ personal love of drama was impressed by teenage journeys to the theater in Darlington, close to his childhood residence in northeast England. He worries {that a} mixture of cuts to arts training and the hovering value of theater tickets is popping appearing right into a profession for the privileged.
He’s passionate about NT Dwell, which lets folks see productions for the worth of a film ticket. “The Motive and the Cue” is the 99th manufacturing within the sequence, which started in 2009 and now broadcasts to 700 cinemas all over the world. NT Dwell makes use of a number of cameras, monitoring pictures and close-ups to merge the immediacy of stay theater and the intimacy of movie.
“Entry to the humanities is turning into so strangled,” Gatiss mentioned. “There are a variety of posh actors, in a kind of ‘Brideshead’ form of approach. It seems like we want a Sixties-type motion of getting working-class voices into the humanities.”
“The good irony is, theater was the nice democratizer,” he mentioned. “It was as little as you may get. Actors have been so disreputable. I feel we perhaps have to get again to that.”
