Review of The Motive and the Cue, Noël Coward Theatre
A few months ago a picture circulated of some books for sale in the National Theatre’s gift shop. It’s now a commonplace to say that places like the National Theatre and its gift shop aren’t, in fact, the forcing houses for any kind of avant garde. You’ll find the same books in the window of Waterstones. But there’s something else to these books. None of them have anything to do with theatre. This speaks to another kind of parochialism. In the Britain of 2024, separate disciplines or media do not exist. All of these pursuits are now balled into an abstract ‘Culture’, which is assumed to have civic, moral and pedagogical properties. Creative endeavours are now simply part of a wider Public Sphere melange. And so, when we’re in the National Theatre in 2024, Culture with a capital C is occurring, something that needs must include a bit of the arts, a bit of history, a bit of various social questions and, above all, a potted narrative for the audience to take with them. This can explain the job lot feel of this quotidian selection: books about digital conspiracies, books about race, books about climate, books about healthcare, books about Postliberalism, popular histories of the Georgian era. We’re in a Cultural place, so it’s time for the thinking caps to come on.
This is something that has a lot to do with the cultural monopoly of the BBC, which from its inception was given a brief to both entertain and inform – and preferably to blend the two together. This has given the BBC, and indeed British public life, an infotainment feel ever since: you can observe this in shows like Parade’s End (2012), in which the characters are simply ciphers for the dueling worldviews of the Edwardian era. I recently came across an especially concentrated example of this, which was a discussion between David Aaronovitch, Nigella Lawson, Christopher Hitchens and Muriel Spark about Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader (1997), which tries to jazz up an ordinary boy-meets-older-woman love story by revealing that the heroine had some small hand in the Final Solution. Hitchens and Spark are fairly dismissive of the book, which leaves Aaronovitch and Nigella baffled. Didn’t they realise that the novel was about the Holocaust? To the latter two, that something might Grapple with big ideas is enough to justify it is a piece of art, or at least enough to earn it some baseline kudos.
It would have been very easy for Jack Thorne’s new play The Motive and the Cue to follow this basic pop pedagogical line. Motive is about John Gielgud and Richard Burton’s 1964 production of Hamlet, which was performed in ordinary clothes rather than period costume. Gielgud is a stately thespian on the wane, Burton a big Hollywood star; and each resents the other for these qualities. Nor can Burton and Gielgud agree on how the titular character should be played: Burton wants sturm und drang and raw anguish, but Gielgud keeps reeling him in. A perfect setup, then, for an informative play about what happens when dueling theories of acting collide, or even, the midcentury changing of the guards in English theatre.
To its credit Motive does not take this easy route. Almost nothing is made of the production’s novel premise, and Gielgud and Burton never present any worked-out theory of theatre to each other – any more than Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus dwelt on the dueling German and Italian styles of opera. There isn’t, thankfully, any kind of discursive scene in Motive where Burton screams something like: “Well I think that the theatre needs to make us feel something!” Motive has the courage to forego these crutches, and instead plays itself as a psychological drama about two artists. Like Amadeus, this is a play about talent, jealousy and secular success. Our heroes cannot stand each other; but each acknowledges the other as his only peer, and they become increasingly annoyed at anything or anyone that distracts them from their death struggle. All else is rightly tuned out. A young William Redfield is briefly introduced as a kind of audience stand-in, through which we will presumably be guided through the magic of theatre, but he’s wisely allowed to recede into the background in the second act. Similarly, Motive resists the temptation to say something thin about the arts writ large: at one point Gielgud’s assistant asks him what the relevance of Shakespeare is to the world of the 1960s, he only shrugs distractedly, his mind on Burton and the play, and the idea is dropped.
The personal dynamic between the two develops in a fairly interesting way. Contrary to what we might expect, Gielgud wears his feelings openly and can’t resist blurting out his darkest anxieties to everyone he meets, while Burton is all strained artifice.
However, as a psychological drama Motive does not ultimately succeed. The central conflict of the play arrives and peaks far too early. Gielgud and Burton are practically at each other’s throats in the very first table read, and halfway through act one Burton is already shrieking obscenities. Burton and Gielgud have a number of explosive yet ultimately glancing clashes which each seems to instantly forget about. Ultimately Elizabeth Taylor, who is also here, is too adept at smoothing everything over, and so the whole thing seems to lack any kind of emotional risk. Even the production never feels like it’s in serious jeopardy. In the end everything is neatly sewn up when Taylor tells Gielgud about Burton’s difficult father. This allows Burton to unlock Hamlet’s relationship with his father, and by extension the whole role. It’s a shame that things end this way – Gielgud and Burton are two accomplished thespians who have each plumbed the depths of the human story as Falstaff, Lear, Macbeth, Prospero; but can nevertheless be flipped over by these kinds of pop Freudian bromides. It’s a testament to their enduring hold over our imagination as late as the 2020s – even the Bard is no match for them, apparently.
In the very last moments of Motive, as Yorick’s skull is produced for the first time, the screens on the side of the stage inform us that the play was actually a big success, and that Gielgud, presented to us as a figure of sad decline, in fact went “from strength to strength”. The past two hours have seen Burton and Gielgud put everything on the line in this production, so it’s another shame that this sense of artistic risk is undercut at the last second. Motive decides to become merely a depiction of an episode in the history of theatre; it’s akin to a postscript in Amadeus telling us that Salieri didn’t actually hate Mozart, and that his work is enjoying a critical revival in the present day. In these two losses of nerve, Motive unfortunately fails to make its creative escape from the National Theatre gift shop, and sits in repose alongside Ten Georgian-era Grub Street Bed Bouncers (Faber and Faber, 2013).
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
If you pay a licence fee be ashamed.
Burton’s voice was a once in a lifetime experience to hear. The ‘diamond cut precision’ of his delivery was a thing of beauty, delivered in a mellifluous baritone. Stirring stuff!
“the sloeback, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat bobbing sea”
You get some idea of Gielgud in his (abridged) reading of ‘Brideshead Revisited’ and also the wonderful scene in the original TV version where he tortures poor “rather short” Charles.
“hard up, penurious, distressed, embarrassed, stony broke, on the rocks, in queer street …”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGyqO5Bv-XA
In my opinion, a play about theatre actors staging a play is seriously too meta.