The Noël Coward Theatre on St Martin’s Lane is hosting something unusual: a play about a play, set in a rehearsal room, about the most famous production of Hamlet never filmed. Jack Thorne’s The Motive and the Cue arrived at the West End venue on 9 December 2023 for a strictly limited 15-week run through 23 March 2024, following a sold-out premiere at the National Theatre’s Lyttelton auditorium where previews began 21 April 2023 with an official opening on 2 May.
The production dramatises the fraught collaboration behind the 1964 Broadway staging of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, directed by Sir John Gielgud and starring Richard Burton – then newly married to Elizabeth Taylor and desperate to prove himself as a serious classical actor. Gielgud, then 60, had played the Dane more than 500 times across six productions between 1930 and 1946. His concept for the Broadway run was to strip away period spectacle and stage the play as a modern-dress rehearsal, an experimental approach that collided with Burton’s method-driven spontaneity.
Johnny Flynn plays Burton. Mark Gatiss – the Sherlock co-creator and Doctor Who contributor – takes the role of Gielgud. Tuppence Middleton portrays Elizabeth Taylor. The supporting cast includes Allan Corduner as Hume Cronyn, Luke Norris as William Redfield (whose memoir Letters from an Actor is one of Thorne’s primary sources), and Janie Dee as Eileen Herlie.
Thorne’s script draws on two published accounts of the original production: Redfield’s Letters from an Actor (1966), a collection of letters from the actor who played Guildenstern, and Richard L. Sterne’s John Gielgud Directs Richard Burton in Hamlet: A Journal of Rehearsals (1969). Both texts document the generational clash between Gielgud’s classical vocal tradition and the raw emotional approach favoured by Burton – a tension that mirrored a broader shift in British theatre during the postwar period, when working-class actors began displacing the RADA-trained establishment.
The title itself comes from Hamlet’s “rogue and peasant slave” soliloquy in Act Two, Scene Two, and the play interrogates what motivates an actor to take on the role. As Gielgud says in the text: “I am yesterday’s stale toast.” His career had been eclipsed by the new wave of British talent – Terence Stamp, Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay – and the Burton Hamlet offered a chance to remain relevant. Burton, for his part, needed Gielgud’s Shakespearean authority to legitimise his transition from Hollywood leading man to stage actor of substance.
Director Sam Mendes conceived the project and sent Thorne the source materials before the COVID-19 pandemic. Mendes previously collaborated with production designer Es Devlin on The Lehman Trilogy (2022), which won the Olivier Award for Best New Play. Devlin returns here, alongside costume designer Katrina Lindsay, lighting designer Jon Clark, composer Benjamin Kwasi Burrell, and sound designer Paul Arditti.
The National Theatre run received five-star reviews from the Financial Times, WhatsOnStage, and Broadway World. The Evening Standard described it as “elegant” and “a love letter to theatre,” while Dominic Cavendish of The Telegraph called it “a witty, deft, touching evocation of a fascinating, fraught encounter that captures the mood of those times.” Jessie Thompson wrote in The Independent: “It’s Gatiss, as Gielgud, who owns this show. He deserves all the superlatives for a performance of restrained, quiet dignity, laced with sharp wit.” The Guardian‘s Arifa Akbar gave a more measured assessment, praising the performances but noting that “ultimately, this play-about-the-play leaves us wishing we had been there to see Burton in the real thing.”
The production won Best Play at the 2023 Evening Standard Theatre Awards. At the 2024 Laurence Olivier Awards, Gatiss won Best Actor in a Play, while the production received nominations for Best New Play and Best Director for Mendes. It also earned WhatsOnStage Award nominations for Best New Play, Best Direction, and Best Casting Direction.
A Broadway transfer was announced in June 2024, with an opening planned for spring 2025 in one of the Shubert Organization’s theatres. The production retains the original creative team and principal cast. Meanwhile, The Motive and the Cue was captured for National Theatre Live and broadcast in cinemas worldwide from 21 March 2024.
Thorne, born in Bristol in 1978, is one of the most prolific British dramatists of his generation. His stage work includes Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (Palace Theatre, 2016), which won nine Olivier Awards and six Tony Awards, including Best Play in both cases. His television credits include National Treasure (2016) and This Is England ’86/’88/’90 (co-written with Shane Meadows). He received the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Award for Outstanding Contribution to Writing in 2022.
The Noël Coward Theatre has its own connection to the material: the venue, originally called the New Theatre, hosted Gielgud’s own Hamlet in 1934 for 155 performances. Eighty-nine years later, it houses a play about Gielgud directing someone else in the same role. As Flynn told London Theatre Magazine: “We were workshopping this in lockdown in 2021, yearning to be back in the rehearsal room.” Gatiss added: “Equally you don’t need to know anything about theatre to enjoy it. It’s also about fame, addiction, class, fathers and sons, ghosts. It’s got everything – just like Hamlet!”
The Motive and the Cue runs at the Noël Coward Theatre, 85-88 St Martin’s Lane, London WC2N 4AU, until 23 March 2024. Tickets are available via TheMotiveandtheCue.com.
