‘Hamlet,’ Elizabeth Taylor, and a Portable Bloody Mary Cabinet: The True Story Behind Sam Mendes’s Thrilling New Play

When, one night in Manhattan, 1964, Truman Capote accepted a ride in Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s limousine after the theater, the author wasn’t prepared to find himself at the center of a mob scene. “Damp, ghostly faces were flattened against the car’s windows,” he wrote. “The whole scene was like a stilled avalanche nothing could budge.” The crowds would gather the following evening, and the one after that, too; Burton, fresh from starring alongside Taylor in Cleopatra, had signed on to play Hamlet for 17 weeks on Broadway, and pandemonium raged outside the Midtown theater.

It’s this fraught Shakespeare production—led by Burton, directed by West End titan John Gielgud, and underwritten by Taylor’s tangential involvement—that has inspired director Sam Mendes’s The Motive and the Cue, opening at the Lyttelton Theatre in London this spring. It marks the Oscar winner’s first return to the stage since 2018’s The Lehman Trilogy.

“For me, The Motive and the Cue tries to find answers to three questions,” Mendes reflects. “Why would the era’s biggest movie star—Richard Burton—want to spend his honeymoon playing a role which has already been played by thousands of actors, while his new wife—Elizabeth Taylor—sits in a hotel room waiting for him to return? Why do we go back to these plays over and over, and what is the point of classical theater at all? What goes on in a rehearsal room when you make theater, and—if there is conflict—is that really such a bad thing?”

Penned by Tony winner Jack Thorne, Motive reexamines the forces that made Burton’s Hamlet both a commercial triumph (with more than 200,000 tickets sold over a record-​
setting 136 performances) and an interpersonal disaster. In truth, the chaos had nothing on the tumult backstage: Burton clashed bitterly with Gielgud over the staging ahead of opening night, with Taylor acting as go-between. Burton “wanted to be thought of as [being] in the line of great actors like Gielgud,” explains Johnny Flynn, who stars as the actor. “He’s hoping that by working with Sir John, he’ll become [like] that, but he’s instinctively not. He’s kind of like a wild animal, really.”

Mark Gatiss appears as Gielgud, whose fraught relationship with Burton is central to the play.Photographed by Willow Williams

We meet on set for the cast’s Vogue shoot in a North London studio, where production is running behind schedule (although not to a Taylor-​like degree: The actor would, as Burton once lamented, be “late for the Last bloody Judgment”). Flynn, by contrast, is calm, quiet, and introspective—reclining peacefully on a leather sofa next to Tuppence Middleton, set to play Taylor, and Mark Gatiss, the production’s campy, energetic Gielgud.

We’ve stolen 40 minutes between portraits, and the rehearsal-​like atmosphere—everyone in monochrome, studio lights, Colorama scrolls—is fitting. Gielgud staged his Hamlet as if it were a final run-through, without elaborate costumes, props, or backdrops: “quite a modern idea at the time,” as Flynn notes, and something Mendes will reference in his staging.