The Motive and the Cue
Johnny Flynn: ‘I fall asleep to Richard Burton reading me ”Under Milk Wood”’. A play about rehearsals for a play, Jack Thorne’s ‘The Motive and The Cue’ was already deeply meta, but this transfer to the West End doubles down on such self-referential swagger. Transferring from the NT’s Lyttelton Theatre, this riotous peek behind the scenes of Richard Burton’s seminal ‘Hamlet’ – in which the Welsh hellraiser butted heads with stately director John Gielgud as they prepared for the groundbreaking 1964 Broadway production – now has the added layer of taking place in the very theatre in which Gielgud himself played the Dane in 1935. Though it boasts a cast of 16, ‘The Motive and The Cue’ is a two-hander writ large, with multi-hyphenate folk singer and screen star Johnny Flynn taking on Burton’s charismatic, boozy bluster and Mark Gatiss launching himself into a condescending but sensitive Gielgud. Under the direction of Sam Mendes, both are sensational. Flynn wisely never overeggs the trademark Welsh accent, but still manages to remarkably channel the Port Talbot-raised Hollywood star, thrusting his jaw and wearing a white woollen roll neck as if it were armour. Gatiss is just as impressive, his uncanny Gielgud manifesting a man in flux, as a new era of performance threatens to subsume his traditional take on stagecraft. Gatiss’s Gielgud is lonely and lost, but still more than capable of getting one over on the wayward Burton. With a backdrop of ‘Mad Men’-worthy costuming and a