The Motive and the Cue - Lyttleton NT / Noel Coward

When Motive first was announced, the dates from 27th June to 15th July were listed on the NT website but then were subsequently removed. I had queried the gap between 10th and 27th because that was when I had wanted to see it if possible. It was obviously always planned to announce these extra performances.

Seeing it tomorrow! Will report on running time

Any reports? I'm in tonight!

Oh poor things. Any news on why?

Someone tweeted
“What's happened with Motive and Cue at the National Theatre ? They've cancelled the first preview tomorrow, citing not enough time to complete the technical rehearsal”
No further knowledge, all second hand, but was cancelled on webiste.

This was about an hour an 15 first half, an hour second half. We came out at just after 10pm tonight.

Wow, so my second preview last night was indeed the first!
I thought it was delightful (so did the audience - big cheers at the end, instant standing ovation) but I normally do like the sneak peak behind the stage and see how great things made out of blood, tears, slammed doors, good intentions and compromises. I’d say the show is in a very good shape but you’ll never know cause the most of it is about a rehearsal process anyway. And because of that there is a space for it to be growing, might even feel completely different by the closing night.

Both leads are perfectly fitted for the part and playing off each other nicely: Mark Gatiss as ‘Sir John’ is gentle, sharp and highly intelligent, Johnny Flynn as ‘King Richard’ is conflicted by his own bloated ego and the strive to be truly great. A lot of Uncle Will related jokes from other plays that brought quite some chuckles in the auditorium. Mendes is theatrical as always, big gestures, but here it fits perfectly considering the subject matter.
I found it too cold to wait by the Stage door but I do wish someone could tell Mark Gatiss that he should do more Shakespeare. Such rare talent to articulate it so clearly, pace it so well and feel every line so deeply it hurts. His ‘Speak the speech, I pray you’ is going to stay with me for quite some time..

As for running tome I was out by 10:15. I personally think you are particularly in for a treat with this show if you are into various interpretation of Shakespeare and like digging deep. Might be a miss for you if you don’t. I saw a couple beside me split in the interval, the husband went home cause he couldn’t stand this Shakespearean talk any longer, and the wife stayed only to enormously enjoy herself. She then said it might be because she brings him to too many shows

I quite liked it. I'm unfamiliar with Hamlet (never read it, never seen it, obviously have heard of the 'To Be or Not To Be' speech, but that's about it) so some of the digging deep into the scenes/motivations/characterisations went straight over my head. I think I would have enjoyed it more or maybe gotten into the play more quickly if I had a bit more background on Hamlet. I still found the material quite engaging (probably helped by the non Shakespeare scenes in between), but my favourite parts were the actual human conflict scenes between Gielgud and Burton.

On the other hand, Gielgud/Burton/Taylor are very much not my era (again not seen any films they've been in) so I don't have any actual image or sound of them in my mind that would make me think the actors are trying to do impersonations. Very much agree with the above poster that I would love to see Mark Gatiss do more Shakespeare, this was my first time seeing him on stage and I thought he was fantastic.

Spoiler request

How mature/explicit is this play? Was thinking of bringing a preteen.

Sounds intriguing. From what I've read on here so far, it has reminded me of this insightful, gossipy ( 6:20 ) delight from the early 1960s:

BurlyBeaR Please may we have a poll?

Saw this tonight and LOVED it. Basically, I agree with what Rumbledoll and Kate8 said, above.

In particular, Mark Gatiss is really phenomenal, and moving, as Gielgud, in my opinion.

Some spoilers follow. . .

I've seen quite a few Burton - Taylor movies (the best one by far is "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" though I'm quite fond of the trashy airport movie, "The VIPs," on account of the fact Maggie Smith's character is so sweet in it lol), but before this week I was unaware you could even watch a recording of Burton's Hamlet, let alone do so on YouTube.

I watched it earlier this week and felt that Hume Cronyn's Polonius was easily the best performance in it. Burton's voice is one-of-a-kind incredible, wiry, muscular and electric, and a couple of his monologues were heartfelt, but by and large, he just turned his electric voice intensity up from 100 to a 1000 volts, whenever he thought the audience needed a jolt, with little obvious evidence of genuine feeling behind it, or so I felt, anyway.

And that sense, I got, of an insecure actor, struggling to give a great performance, is partly what the show is about, at least as far as Johnny Flynn's Burton is concerned. And Burton, rightly or wrongly, blames his director, Mark Gatiss's Gielgud for not giving him more help.

Flynn has a hell of a challenge here, having first to capture the allure of that electric voice (he does) and then on top of that, having to depict Burton's alpha male outward affect, while simultaneously showing us his inner fragility. This is after all, the polar opposite of what we have seen from previous Flynn characters, like in "The Heretic" and "Hangmen, where he has played beta seeming outward characters with inner balls of steel (God, I loved his passive aggressive sh*t with the peanuts in "Hangmen " lol). Well, Flynn is 90 percent there with his fragile alpha persona, at this stage of previews, and can only get better from here.

Tuppence Middleton's Elizabeth Taylor character is very much there to reveal Burton's inner fragility to the audience, and she nails it.

But the absolute heart of this show is Gatiss's Sir John Gielgud, who is a magnificent and moving portrait of the man. At one point, Gielgud, frustrated by Burton's shouty macho posturing tells him his Hamlet would obviously have killed Claudius right from the start, and advises him to build his character more slowly. That slow build is what Gatiss perfects in his portrayal of Gielgud.

I was reminded very much of Gatiss's performance as Charles I in Hampstead Theatre's "55 Days," a man out of time, and Gatiss shows Gielgud to be similarly vulnerable, a kind of doomed and deposed king of a theatre whose priorities are changing out from under him. Gatiss shows the humour of the man, the fear, the dignity and the decency, the heart, the vulnerability, the aging, the indecisiveness, the shadow and the pride of his former greatness, as well as an aloofness rooted more in loneliness than condescension.

For a play which press has all been about Burton and Taylor, I found it ironic yet oddly affecting that it's not the new that carries most of the heart and pathos, but the old.

In small roles, Janie Dee and Aysha Kala and Luke Norris are very impressive.

Jack Thorne has probably hobbled his play from having momentous and massively dramatic confrontations, that would have raised the play's entertainment value, out of fealty to the truth. But if it's never as thrilling as "Virginia Woolf," it's nonetheless compelling and amusing and, in Gatiss's portrayal of Gielgud, it's very moving.

4 stars from me at this preview stage. I hope to go again.

Also there last night and really enjoyed it. The end of act one was really moving and Mark Gatiss was a joy in general. I'm not steeped in the timbre of the "real" voices of the characters so I wasn't analysing that, but was glad to have a reasonable knowledge of Hamlet and an outline understanding of the personalities involved. Sure I'm not the only one who thought Gertrude was familiar and was surprised to find it was Janie Dee! Whilst you could argue that a NT crowd would be likely to get the references, that also makes the production vulnerable to negative opinion, so it was lovely to hear a genuine warm reception, with cheers from the moment the curtain calls started. This isn't going to appeal to everyone but, if you think you might like it, I think you will! Personally standingo I'd have been uneasy at times with a preteen watching this, but I also don't think they'd get much from it, so it maybe depends on why you were thinking of taking them!