a metatheatre interlude
two reviews
I finished War and Peace, which I had been reading since the end of November. War and Peace is absolutely a romance novel and a historical romance at that. But reading the longest book I have ever read means that I’ve let romance reading fall by the wayside. More on War and Peace coming, more romance reading coming, but for now, two reviews of some things I saw that I can’t shake.
The Motive and the Cue
The main goal of my recent trip to London was to see theater. I went last summer and saw two plays and regretted not going to one a day. The jewel of my schedule this time was The Motive and the Cue dir. Sam Mendes1 which I ended up seeing twice. The play stars Mark Gatiss as John Gielgud and Johnny Flynn as Richard Burton during the rehearsals leading up to their highly successful Broadway production of Hamlet. The production takes place in 1964, immediately after Burton’s marriage to Elizabeth Taylor, played glamorously and broadly by Tuppence Middleton.
The crux of the resulting conflict is that Gielgud is old school and his style is on its way out, whereas Burton is method and in demand. Gielgud’s portrayal of Hamlet at the Old Vic is the definitive Hamlet, at least to theater going folks from Great Britain—which Burton was (the play takes a few cheeky swipes from all directions at Laurence Olivier’s filmed Hamlet). But the layers are not quite as neat as Gielgud : old and staid :: Burton : young and refreshing. Gielgud is clearly respected by the entire cast in the play, hinting at his future successes as mentor to a new generation of actors as a director and film actor and Flynn as Burton is in full lush form. Any external sense of Burton’s history that the audience brings to the play, reinforced by references to his abusive childhood, alcoholic father, his own alcoholism and a penchant for hiding the truth about all three, emphasizes to the audience that we’re watching a man who is (or at least about to be) in crisis.
The conceit of their Hamlet was that what the audience would see would be staged like the last run through before dress rehearsal, in modern dress with minimal staging and props. Many scenes either start or end with a character in front of the curtain, alone or in small groups, performing a scene from Hamlet. The illusion will break when they flub a line or Gielgud stops them to offer notes, or the scene ends and the character will reintegrate into the 1964 setting. So The Motive and the Cue’s audience is “watching a rehearsal” just as the 1964 audience was. Bolstered by being structured around a play that feels infinite, The Motive and the Cue presents all these lovely angles to Gielgud and Burton’s relationship and the parallels of their careers and their personal lives that they bring to Hamlet.
The most potent connections with Hamlet are Gielgud and Burton’s thoughts about having enough time and how to control it, which is of course one of the questions for the Danish Prince as well. Hamlet laments that he is born to set time out of joint right, but Gielgud and Burton seem even less sure of their destinies. Gielgud’s introspection is given over to considering his past work and any potential he has in a new world of film, advertising or even directing--a role in the theater he is less inspired by than acting at this point. Burton’s is about how to take on the role of Hamlet under Gielgud, who he respects greatly, but feels cannot direct in the way that Burton needs. Gielgud frequently finds himself giving Burton line readings, to Burton’s great annoyance. At one point, Burton mockingly does a monologue with an impression of Gielgud to point out the ridiculousness of Welsh Burton affecting Gielgud’s received pronunciation vowels and sing-song cadence. Gielgud sees Burton as potentially wasting his talent focusing on film when he could be on the stage, all while knowing himself that Laurence Oliver’s success in film may lead to a longer legacy than Gielgud’s own.2 Burton is crushed by anxiety about being good enough for critics, all while finding himself more easily motivated by projects seemingly catered to having a good time with Elizabeth and making lots of money.
The metatheatre conceit is emphasized by the iterative nesting of actor/director/character tensions. Gielgud is directing Burton as Hamlet, using his own experience as Hamlet to attempt to guide the younger actor to transcendence. By nesting invented dialogue of the rehearsals with the actors as actors as characters, The Motive and the Cue is able to borrow another play within a play layer from Shakespeare. Gielgud and Burton’s motivating moment of conflict and understanding of the text of Hamlet is structured around the “O, What A Rogue And Peasant Slave Am I” speech where Hamlet gets the idea to stage The Murder of Gonzago, which he will use to confirm Claudius’ treasonous murder of Hamlet Sr. Hamlet then takes the role of director of this play. This speech is also where the title The Motive and the Cue comes from. So Gatiss is playing Gielgud directing Burton, as played by Flynn, as Hamlet as director of the merry players. And Hamlet’s complaints about the actor’s Hecuba soliloquy mirror Burton’s complaints of Gielgud’s style of acting--overly lachrymose without truly feeling.
Burton runs though this speech in the first of two private rehearsals with Gielgud. Burton yells too much for Gielgud and Gielgud can’t help but give line readings and emphasize the melody of the speech. This is the rehearsal where the pair finally come to verbal blows, unsure if they’ll be able discover a workable Hamlet. Burton takes it even further in the next scene by showing up drunk to a group rehearsal and insulting Gielgud in front of the cast. But the pair returns to the subject of the Hecuba speech in a second more successful private rehearsal, one that Burton asks for, instead of one that Gielgud assigns, to work through the “To be or not to be” monologue.
When discussing the overarching motivation for Hamlet, they speak about their own fathers--Gielgud’s tepid, stockbroker father who loved theater so much he married into the Terry family but wanted his son to be an architect and Burton’s alcoholic, Welsh miner father who abandoned Burton as a child. We watch them uncover Burton’s Hamlet together. Giegud returns to “the motive and the cue” from the Hecuba speech in his advice to Burton: “The motive and the cue. Hamlet’s own words. The motive is the spine of a role – the intellect and the reason – the cue is the passion – the inner switch which ignites the heart.” Burton has access to a Hamlet, totally unavailable to Gielgud, but also unavailable to him without Gielgud. After finding a space to consider the character together, Burton performs his monologue and Gielgud concludes: “And that is a Hamlet I have never seen.”
John Gielgud was 60 at the time of production and Richard Burton was 39. What I couldn’t stop thinking every time Gielgud mentions Burton’s potential and his anxiety about his own legacy was that Burton would die before reaching the age that Gielgud feels his career might be over. The play ends with Burton walking upstage, lit so it seems infinite, to pick up Yorick’s skull in silhouette. While this is happening with swelling music, supertitles3 reveal the box-office success of the play, which coincided with a revival of Gielgud’s career in film as an actor and on stage as a director. Burton’s best performance is yet to come (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf dir. Mike Nichols, 1966), but he did not achieve similar successes on the stage again and died in 1984 at the age of 58. Gielgud would die at age 96 in 2000 as a beloved elder statesman of London theater, the last connection to a heyday much admired.
If you happen have access to a movie theater that participates in programming National Theatre live productions, The Motive and The Cue is a part of that spring programming. I found a filmed version of Burton’s Hamlet on Youtube. It has a transfer of a transfer of a transfer quality, but Burton is clearly an enthralling presence. I didn’t struggle to avoid looking at my phone when I had it on (an embarrassing endorsement, but meaningful) and I realized that I’ve maybe never seen Hamlet with an audience before. The laughter of the audience, particularly at Hume Cronyn’s Tony-winning Polonius, was delightful.
The Debussy Film
Mike Leigh Summer made way for Ken Russell Winter and I’ve been picking at Russell’s varied filmography for a few months now. Russell is maybe best known for Tommy, The Who’s rock opera or The Devils, the highly controversial 1971 film that was, for years, difficult to watch in the United States. The films I’ve been the most drawn to during this watch project are the biopics of artists that Russell made. My favorite so far has been Mahler, which follows Gustav Mahler through his memories on his last train ride, certainly influenced by my new going-to-the-orchestra habit I developed last year and Tar and Maestro. Mahler looks very much like a Russell film to me, weird and wonderful and sensual and sickly.
But before Russell had studio bridges to burn, he has a BBC contract. Like Mike Leigh’s BBC productions that prefigure his features, with their theatrical character studies and tight casts, Russell’s BBC productions show early indications of his interest in artist biographies and warped narrative structures. Even Elgar, his first and most straightforward production, plays with documentary/biopic conventions of voice over and reenactment in ways that are more exciting than basically any biographical film I’ve seen.
The Debussy Film is the Russell that I watched immediately after returning from London. The film starts with a bustle of activity on a movie set, where half the people are in period costume and the other half are wearing modern dress for 1965. A director explains the circumstances of the scene to a young boy in a bit part: a great composer has died, but the war has prevented him from having a funeral as grand as he ought to have had. The dead composer is Debussy and while the film starts with his funeral, we are not strictly in a frame narrative biopic, à la Lawrence of Arabia, we’re watching a film about the production of a biopic. (The full film is on YouTube. The transfer is not amazing, but sound enough. I watched it from a box set of Russell’s BBC films).
Like most people, I mostly know Debussy from “Claire de Lune” and I know Claire de Lune from movies (Fran on the cinematic ubiquity of the song!) I was an art history major, so I know the oversaturation of impressionism has little relation to the combustive circumstances of the creation of these paintings, though I had never applied that historical context to Debussy, who I never really thought of and if I did, I am sure I found him anodyne.
But this film make clears both the tempestuous circumstances that Debussy was composing and the conflict created by his music. The film strings together the scenes of the film within the film with scenes about the production of the film. “Director” played by Vladek Sheybal also “plays” Pierre Louÿs, Debussy’s supporter and friend, a photographer and erotic poet. Context for the visual scenes is given by the director explaining the history and psychology of Debussy to the Actor playing Debussy, Oliver Reed. Reed will also take up the voiceover in the first-person as Debussy.
Scenes will start as appearing a part of the movie within the movie and suddenly break as we see the “behind the scenes,” the Director breaking character as Louÿs to give instruction, or Russell’s camera turns a 180 degrees to show the in-universe camera capturing the scene. All while this is happening, there seem to be romantic connections between the Actor playing Debussy and the Actresses who play the women important to Debussy’s life, creating a overlap of which scenes are showing the love triangles from the 1890s and which are the fictional love triangles of the framing film from 1965. The other sort of scene is a montage of activity, sometimes clearly a depiction of Debussy and cohort, sometimes more likely to be production narrative, signaled one way or the other by the costuming, all while a Debussy piece plays as the score.
The greatest conflation happens between Actor as Debussy and Debussy, whereas the women surrounding both figures seem more interested in keeping the divide reinforced. In the scene that best captures Russell’s very British humor, at a party that is firmly in the 1960s, Oliver Reed’s character turns off The Kinks record to put on a Debussy record and Actress playing Gabrielle Dupont, one of Debussy’s lovers, asks the room “does anybody want to shake to Debussy?” When the Actor insists, the Actress responds by doing a strip tease and the Actor seethes in response. The Actor does not respond violently at the party, but in the next scene we see Debussy in a violent fight with Gabrielle. The Director enters the room, in character as Louÿs, attempting to intervene. As director, he says “cut” and Actor and Actress both immediately settle from the violent scene.
The effect of the film is much clearer than I feel like my description is--it is easy to watch Oliver Reed as Actor playing Debussy and know that we are both watching the depiction of process of an actor attempting to embody a historical figure and watching a scene that is supposed to be Reed depicting Debussy, without all the meta stuff in between. The Motive and the Cue has the infinite depth of Hamlet and it’s play-within-a-play language to mine for structure, and The Debussy Film has the nature of Debussy’s work, so often responsive to or inspired by art in a different medium.
In my favorite scene in the film, the Director guides the Actor through the Tate, looking at Pre-Raphaelite paintings and discussing other influences, including JMW Turner and James McNeill Whistler. The Director mentions that Debussy composed La Damoiselle élue inspired by Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The Blessed Damozel, which was both a poem and a painting by the Pre-Raphaelite. That poem was at least in part inspired by “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe. The Director references Rossetti’s “betrayal” of his model here, paralleling the eventual betrayal Debussy will commit against Dupont. Director and Actor leave the gallery and Actress is left to giggle at pre-Raphaelite paintings in the Tate, in a sequence of shot, reverse shots as La Damoiselle élue plays. There are at least two levels of falseness in this anecdote, that stretch and warp the reality along with Russell’s structure.
The poem The Blessed Damozel was not exclusively inspired by Elizabeth Siddal, the Cockney model of Rossetti’s, who most parallels the stormy relationship between Debussy and working class Dupont, nor is she the model in the painting. The poem was originally composed in 1847, before Siddal and Rossetti met and the both paintings were done after she passed away and Rossetti had moved on to other models, namely Alexa Wilding and Jane Morris. But it is easy to project the tragedy of Siddal onto a poem about a beautiful woman in heaven and her continued yearning for her earthly love. Additionally—this painting is not in the Tate’s collection. It is in the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Liverpool. Theoretically, it could have travelled to be a part of a Tate’s exhibition in the 1960s, though in reviewing a list of Tate exhibitions, I saw no example that was clearly a possibility. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was decidedly out of favor by the 1960s, with their literary references and symbolism. Revisiting them and their reputations starts to be a trend in this decade, but they are fully revived by the 1980s and this is when the big retrospective happens at the Tate.4 Also, all the other paintings that are shown are a part of the Tate’s permanent collection.
To me, this is not IMDb style Goof or a Lie, but another nested artifice built into Russell’s world of looking at artists making art. After all, Actress does not wander galleries as the painting in the reverse shot pans change, but stands in one place, looking and giggling. It’s all magic.
Another one of Russell’s BBC productions was a look at Rossetti and Siddal’s relationship, with Oliver Reed as Rossetti, which I am greatly looking forward to seeing.
upcoming and some recommendations
I started A.S. Byatt’s Possession on a plane and immediately ordered a physical copy because I can tell I’m going to attack this book with underlines and marginalia. Her Art of Fiction is one of my favorites (paywalled at The Paris Review, but the link is an accessible archived version). Victorian poets and archives and romance, it’s all Emma bait. I can’t imagine this doesn’t turn into a Restorative Romance post.
River of the Gods: Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile by Candace Millard is what I ended up reading on the plane and I devoured it. Again, more Victorians, but unlike the Disraeli/Gladstone biography I read last year, Millard is uninterested in concluding that the English imperialists are heroes of their own time, but neither she does she flatten their opposing politics as singularly regressive. It’s adventure and politics, but also within it is one of the kookiest real-life romances I’ve ever read about. Delightful!
War and Peace will be the next newsletter, I promise.
I know Mendes from movies I have seen the trailer of and thought “not for me” (1917, Revolutionary Road), American Beauty (Annette Benning saying: “I will sell this house today”), and once being married to Kate Winslet (speculations of an affair).
In the play, Gielgud says of the theater: “performances writ in water.” Burton also draws comparisons with his own approach and Olivier’s a few times in the play, a comparison made by critics on Burton’s come up. Oliver also has the parallel that eludes Gielgud: a heterosexual sex symbol in a marriage the tabloids care deeply about.
The effect of these supertitles is not unlike the end slides of a biopic, which I find a hacky ending to a genre that I love against my better judgment. But also they made me cry! So--I am the mark that the hacky stuff works on.
Does everyone of Carey Mulligan encouraging Peter Saarsgard to buy the Burne-Jones as often as I do in The Education?
going to be reading this AS Byatt on this rec alone - thank you!