In 1964, John Gielgud directed a stripped-back Broadway production of Hamlet, performed as if it was a final rehearsal, with nothing to distract the audience from the play’s celebrity casting of Richard Burton.
In Jack Thorne’s dramatisation of the pair’s encounter, Mark Gatiss plays Gielgud, whose star is fading, and Johnny Flynn plays Burton, whose star wattage has shot off the scale after his recent marriage to Elizabeth Taylor (Tuppence Middleton). It is Taylor who speaks of the potential for fireworks in this prickly partnership between a “classicist wanting to be modern, and a modern wanting to be a classicist”.
