Thorne said The Motive and the Cue, whose title is taken from a passage in an act-two soliloquy from Hamlet, “examines the beauty of these two ages of the theatre meeting each other and what that felt like,” adding: “Burton was as strong as he ever was.

“He was a man that knew Shakespeare inside and out and who felt it was his great destiny to be the greatest Shakespearean actor of his generation.” “Gielgud played Lear at 26,” Thorne marveled. Burton was to remark that the first time he saw Hamlet was when Gielgud repeated his performance in the 1940s and he later essayed the role in a 1953 production at the Old Vic. Gielgud, who was to win an Oscar for his supporting performance in the comedy Arthur in 1982, was a creature of the classical stage steeped in Shakespeare, he played his own version of the lonely Dane in 1930 and often returned to the role. “And when Sam Mendes asks you to dance with him, you dance,” said the writer, who is also known for series such as This is England, The Fades and National Treasure. Thorne recalled Mendes calling him with the idea.

In Letters from an Actor, Redfield, who’d been cast in the play as Guildenstern, recounted in a series of letters to friends, full of wicked asides, details of the pre-New York run in Toronto and the 137 performances of Hamlet at the Lunt-Fontanne. It starred Burton as the tragic Danish prince and its launch came just a month after Burton and Taylor tied the knot the first time around. Thorne told Deadline the project began during lockdown when Mendes discovered two out-of-print books (Richard Sterne’s John Gielgud Directs Richard Burton in Hamlet and William Redfield’s Letters From an Actor) that chronicled a famously stripped and dressed-down version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which Gielgud directed at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater in New York in April 1964.

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