The longest-running Hamlet in Broadway history was staged in 1964. Richard Burton was the Prince; John Gielgud directed him; Elizabeth Taylor, newly married to Burton, was sultrying around offstage. Rehearsals were not smooth.
Coming across firsthand accounts of those rehearsals – in letters and tapes made by two cast members – director Sam Mendes saw dramatic potential: a confrontation of traditional and modern acting styles; a contrast between a rising celebrity and a fading lead; a way of capturing the changing pulse of a production, celebrating live theatre, rather as his luminous Margate movie Empire of Light celebrated cinema. He approached Jack Thorne – of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and Let the Right One In – to write a play.
The Motive and the Cue is charged up with these concerns as well as with the other questions likely to accompany discussion of a Hamlet production: how’s your father? How haunted are you? Can you make up your mind about whether the play is about making up your mind? Charged up, but without actually propelling the action: too many interesting or debatable notions – “Theatre is thinking,” says Gielgud, but is it, really? – are baldly declared rather than quizzed. Es Devlin’s design – from industrial rehearsal room to the swish, tulip-heavy Burton-Taylor suite – is impressive, as are Katrina Lindsay’s costumes: Taylor has a particularly negligent peach negligee, while Burton smoulders in black jersey (Gielgud put the cast in everyday modern dress).
Movies and theatre are cleverly interleaved, as in Burton’s career, with scenes separated by the opening and closing of a screen like a camera shutter, and quotations from Hamlet (the title is one of these) flashed up between episodes. Shakespeare speeches (mostly from Hamlet, though Juliet also gets a go) are interspersed between rehearsals: they are often finely delivered, not least by Janie Dee as Gertrude, but rarely meshed tellingly into the action. The effect is not so much urgency and development as a series of arresting tableaux.
Still, there is another centre of vitality: the acting. Though Tuppence Middleton’s Taylor lacks purr (a line about being “a vulgarian” would be better delivered as if it were a sly lie), Johnny Flynn’s Burton has cutting allure, not least when having to appear sloshed in white underpants: when he finally stops yelling his soliloquies, he makes you long for more. And Mark Gatiss as Gielgud is a mellifluous marvel. Caught in silhouette, slightly rocking backwards, he might seem to be the man himself. Thorne has slightly underwritten the actor’s mercurial intelligence – his gift for expression was actually of a piece with his famous gaffes – but the charm, the pathos and the sudden skewering wit are finely caught. With a side glance at Laurence Olivier’s style, he tells Burton, beamingly: “You shout wonderfully.”
The aim is inspiring; the execution is ingenious; A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction itself is woeful. Katie Mitchell’s production not only talks about but tackles the climate crisis, setting out to change the way theatre is made by producing itself utterly differently. The play, with a script about ecological catastrophe by Miranda Rose Hall, will tour; the people making it will not move. Each venue will have a different narrator and a different choir to provide a final chorus.
Crucially, the light and sound on stage is provided by the pedal power of local cyclists. This provides an unforgettable moment at the beginning of the evening when, before launching into her description of apocalypse now, Lydia West (of It’s a Sin) declares: “Now we go off-grid.” For a moment the theatre is in darkness, then as green digital numbers appear at the back of the stage, marking the wattage being generated, so do figures in black Lycra, bent over their handlebars, bringing us life.
This moment is worth the rest of the show. Put across overeagerly by West, Hall’s script is soggy with caring, inert with amazement. A basic lecture on the history of creation and extinction – dinosaurs, asteroids, tsunamis – is illustrated by slides of species under threat (oh god, even the white stoat) and punctuated by embarrassing interaction with the audience. However open to eco-shaming, you might not want to be treated like an infant, being asked to share your memories of a tree you have loved, or to wave your arms in the air pretending to be a bough. No one, surely, wants to be thanked for sharing. I could have fuelled the show with the steam coming from my ears, exasperated in proportion to the nobleness of the endeavour.
As ruminative as it is sexy, the swivelling love triangle of Jules et Jim might seem made for intimate stage treatment. Not quite. In adapting Henri-Pierre Roché’s novel, on which Truffaut’s adorably brooding 1962 movie was based, Timberlake Wertenbaker has cleverly honoured the philosophising of the two chaps, while boldly confronting the irritating emptiness of the movie’s love object: captivating because capricious.
Stella Powell-Jones’s production has a sharp performance from Patricia Allison in the Jeanne Moreau role, deft Ravel accompaniment and a witty design by Isabella van Braeckel, which sets the action in front of Matisse-like, blue-on-white splashes, and contains a coup de theatre in the shape of a glass column in which the heroine is viewed like a Damien Hirst artefact. Yet the action feels trapped; what is missing are not big movements – the bicycling and plunging – but the always-flicking camera that tells of an electric current.
Supernova, Rhiannon Neads’s two-hander, seems a slip of a thing but it travels a considerable emotional distance. There is an utterly convincing, completely nonsensical falling in love: she, an astrophysicist, is in a spacesuit; he, a bewildered chap, is got up as Matt Smith in Doctor Who. There is a slide into depression, beautifully calibrated and never indulgent: “Do depressed people pickle?” There is a slide into depression, beautifully calibrated and never indulgent: “Do depressed people pickle?”
Those trained up on such stellar dramas as Constellations will see the metaphor heading towards the plot, but the dialogue of Supernova is as needle-sharp and thoughtful as any I’ve heard this year. Neads, who also stars, draws acutely on her time as a standup, and has a fine batter-back in Sam Swann. Jessica Dromgoole, who directs, also draws on distinguished years as one of the best of BBC radio producers. Her actors listen to each other; as a result, the audience do not merely watch but listen to them.
Star ratings (out of five)
The Motive and the Cue ★★★
A Play for the Living in a Time of Extinction ★★
Jules et Jim ★★★
Supernova ★★★★
