T.S. Eliot defined Hamlet as “the Mona Lisa of literature” and was surely referring to his mysterious appeal, his inexhaustible elusive capacity. It remains the most performed play of all time and the one that, more than four centuries ago, Shakespeare himself was able to see the most times in his life. A great, enormous work, with its poetry, the rhythm and musicality of the verse, its robust, inexorable action, its resonant soliloquies full of great truths. Each actor measures himself against the prince, takes him to his field and exposes himself, when interpreting him he shows something stark about himself, fragility, creativity, madness, impotence, the character requires a certain emotional nudity. In a way, the actor becomes a co-author. Starting from these premises, the British playwright Jack Thorne wrote The Motive and the Cue, Sam Mendes directed the piece at the National Theater in London, and it can now be seen transferred to the Noël Coward Theatre, precisely where John Gielgud played Hamlet in the 1930s.
The play recreates the rehearsals of the famous 1964 Hamlet that Richard Burton starred on Broadway, who hired Sir John Gielgud, the great Shakespeare interpreter, in low hours at that time, to direct it. They made a modern bet: a production that looked like a rehearsal, without sets, naked, in favor of the purity of the text and the glory of Burton. Burton had just married Elizabeth Taylor, they were the two most brilliant stars in Hollywood at the time, they had the fame, the money, they were the real deal. The troupe of actors were all top figures who wanted to be in the project to access artistic greatness, to make history. Taylor was merely Burton’s companion, who vetoed her attendance at rehearsals, because “this is not like the movies” and she feared that she would ruin everything, although the actress ends up mediating the brawl between the two men.
The play is an emotional and hilarious comedy, a theater within a theater, full of self-references, an exploration of key scenes from Shakespeare, father-son psychology, art and fame, and the ordeal experienced by Burton and Gielgud, two Great actors of different generations and methods, both irritable, before arriving at the premiere: it was quite a battle to impose their vision of the melancholic, always doubtful, Danish prince, to explain the mysteries of his celebrated inaction or his limited vengeful power. This great piece by Thorne ends up being a love song for theater and its healing and redemptive power.
Burton and Gielgud, with contrasting temperaments, sought purity. Gielgud’s mastery would provide the lucidity, the clarity, the nuances with which he infused his interpretations – some critics considered that listening to Gielgud was like directly accessing Shakespeare’s thought. Sir John came from a prestigious theatrical lineage, had mastered the stage as a child, and at the age of twenty-seven had performed the entire Shakespeare canon at the Old Vic. The Welshman Burton, Taylor’s character in the play remembers, had a violent father and an alcoholic who, at the age of two, abandoned him to a sister to raise him. With the suffering sensitivity of one, the wild impetuosity of the other, the fight is on: Burton does not tolerate Gielgud modulating his responses, he does not hear the music that Sir John claims to hear in the text, he wants to find, without success, his own truth and The trials go from bad to worse. Gielgud criticizes the Welsh beast – whom he calls “dear boy” – for shouting too much, for serving his ego, for not cultivating art, but rather fame, “that false imposition”, and demands that he measure the vengeful fury of the character.
There is a moment when Burton exasperatedly acknowledges that he is incapable, like Gielgud, of playing “anxiety, fear, guilt and triumph,” all at once, and calls the old actor a part of the past and an outcast. . Lawrence Olivier, who with his Oedipal Hamlet in the cinema won an Oscar in 1948, began as director of the new National Theater and the angry young men renewed the scene, making a clean slate of the past. In one scene, clearly homophobic, Burton shows up to rehearsals drunk, and ends up making a humiliating mockery of the mellifluous tone and mannerisms of Gielgud, who ends up crying and consoling himself with the famous monologue in which Hamlet instructs the Elsinore actors to “adjust the action to the word and the word to the action” and to “not surpass one’s own nature in modesty”, and against apprentices who make fools laugh. Gielgud’s legacy is remembered at the end of the play: in just two years, he had been Romeo, Antony, Richard II, Oberon, Mark Antony, Orlando, Macbeth, Hotspoor, Prospero, Benedick, Lear and Hamlet, and he marked those characters forever.
There are also the bedroom scenes: those of Burton, played by the actor and folk singer Johnny Flynn, and Taylor, a perhaps too elegant Tuppence Midleton, in a luxury hotel where she waits for him, on his honeymoon, in clothes interior, recluse, bored, with the press always on the lookout, and where both drink, drink a lot, flirt, argue, he, her fifth husband, “the best actor I have ever gone to bed with,” reviews the text, she criticizes Gielgud, quotes Shakespeare in her conversations, to which she responds with proverbs from the church of Scientology; He takes the actress’s fantasies of playing Lady Macbeth or Portia out of her head, “you’re too sexy for Portia,” and she advises him to go out and do Hamlet in his underwear, because he likes her body, she says, the abrupt masculinity. her. And Burton’s vulnerability and torment in the face of Hamlet’s challenges seem to awaken the carnal instincts in her former child prodigy.
John Gielgud, his voice and mannerisms masterfully performed by Mark Gatiss, also has his bedroom scene in what must be one of the best moments in recent English theatre: the furtive encounter with a rent boy in the hotel room. The actor, who was sixty years old, does not want sex with the young man, because he has been in love for two years, he did it to do something “reckless.” The hustler sees something “tragic” in this late first love. The allusions to old age, the wasted life that is sensed, and the hug that the young man demands before leaving and which causes Gielgud to sob, ends up being one of the most emotional moments of the piece. Gielgud’s dark moment is also briefly alluded to, when in 1953, the year of Elizabeth II’s coronation and the actor’s royal decoration, he was arrested for having tried to seduce a plainclothes police officer in a public toilet in Chelsea. In a sullen and closed England, it was the most notorious gay scandal since the trial of Oscar Wilde.
It is masterful how the fragments of Hamlet that the actors rehearse seem to add resonances and expand motifs and signals to this excellent piece. “The representation will be the trap into which the king’s conscience will fall.” Gielgud gives Burton an attractive interpretation of the shortcomings of Hamlet’s father, gets Burton to incorporate him into his nature and make his Hamlet, a new Hamlet. From destruction, from vital chaos, from who knows what psychological mechanisms, art and beauty can emerge. Art unites and triumphs. But the Tony was taken by Polonius, poor Ofelia’s unfortunate father.
