When Stars Collide

Sam Mendes's return to London's National Theatre promises a thrilling showdown between Old Hollywood legends. Hayley Maitland meets the cast.

- Hayley Maitland

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?”