The Motive and the Cue - Lyttleton NT / Noel Coward

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!

I'm probably on the conservative side about things I would take a child/young teen to watch, so I wouldn't presume to judge for anyone else. As another poster said,  the more adult content is discussed or implied rather than graphically portrayed. Are you happy to let a number of f***s (sometimes just as swear words, sometimes used as a verb), and a couple of c***s go over their heads? 
Would it bother you that they heard a sex worker list what they were willing to offer?    As I mentioned, I really enjoyed the play, and I dont think any of it is gratuitous, in fact it's part of the poignant emotional tone of the piece. But for me, anyone under 14 or so is unlikely to engage with either the artistic or the personal struggles, and would at best be politely bored. 

Oh a totally weird note. Have I been the only one who wished Johnny Flynn shoes were rubber soled? The constant clicking as he walked back and forth across the stage was beyond irritating.

Oh my goodness, what a show! Everything is fitted so nicely and one can’t help but feel nostalgic for a time when Theatre was very much a staple in society where greats like Richard Burton and John Gielgud tread the boards. Much praise must go to Jack Thorne for writing such a witty and poignant piece of drama which is brought to life by Sam Mendes’ vision. The final scene gave me goosebumps certainly but the build up to that moment, each rehearsal gives an amazing glimpse into a bygone era which I can only wish would come back. Can’t rate this highly enough and hope to see it again, an if not, then stream it. This show very much epitomises why the National Theatre still matters and why we need to continue supporting it.

Not really a spoiler to say that at the end there is a projection on the curtain telling how the production fared and what happened to the leading performers. I don't think I've ever seen that before at the theatre - can anyone think of other examples?

Doesn't necessarily mean this - the NT record everything for archive purposes.

It feels like a possible NT at Home future release but i'd be shocked to see it go out on NT Live