The Motive and the Cue at the National Theatre is a play about putting on a play. That play is the 1964 Broadway production of Hamlet. It starred Richard Burton as Hamlet and was directed by Sir John Gielgud.
We watch as actors play actors playing a part in an uneasy drama, at first, trepidatious and respectful, becoming witty, messy, and brutal but never bitter. Johnny Flynn as Burton has captured the accent and swagger but also the struggle to be vulnerable, to force the light through the cracks, to be his own Hamlet by clawing and snarling his way towards an interpretation of a different, difficult relationship between prince and king, son and father.
This struggle is also true of Gielgud and Burton. In the 1920s and 30s, Gielgud strode the stage like a colossus and this is openly acknowledged by Burton. Burton, on film, was at the height of his powers and fame. He was newly married to Elizabeth Taylor, who spent their honeymoon in a New York hotel while Burton strutted and fretted his hours in the rehearsal room.
Gielgud’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s verse, as an actor, was mellifluous, melodic. Burton, struggling, both for his own version of the troubled prince, and against Gielgud’s heritage, inserts jarring shouts and unsettling pauses into his rendition of the script, much to his director’s and the cast’s consternation. The last ten minutes of the play are electrifying as Burton allows Gielgud to, at least partially, help him find his own way of navigating one of the greatest roles in theatre. The last scene sent shivers down my spine.
It’s not everyone’s cup of tea but I thought it was a kind of love song to the theatre - both from an actor’s and audience’s perspective. Why do we return to see some plays over and over again, even when we know how they end? Why do actors take on these roles, knowing that they tread in the footsteps of giants of their craft? It is about the bravery of being an actor in attempting something as monumental and iconic as Hamlet, and also a human bravery to look at ourselves at our lowest and most defensive and summon up the courage to continue, to make sense of the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”. Shakespeare constantly questioned what it is to be human and Hamlet is probably his closest examination of human identity. A man can be noble, like a God and at the same time, a “quintessence of dust”.
The Broadway play, for all its fraught backstage birthing was a huge success, breaking box office records for revenue and longevity. The dissonance in style and technique between the characters of Gielgud and Burton got me thinking about parallels in paint.
In 1960s London, the life force of figurative painting was represented by two extraordinary painters, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. Each sparred and riffed off the other and Freud has often referred to the sway Bacon had over his life and work.
“Francis opened my eyes in some ways. His work impressed me, but his personality affected me.”
Bacon, the elder of the two by 13 years, made a name for himself as the provocative, often shocking painter of human beings in all their visceral, animalistic physicality - you can often feel bruised and pummelled by an encounter with a Bacon painting as he forces you to experience the body-shock of violence and pain of his subjects, be they alone or coming together in ecstasy or despair. He lived through the turmoil and terror of two World Wars and found a curious beauty in man’s capacity for cruelty and degradation. His paintings expose an awareness of an earthly, primal force within all of us that is caged and controlled by the veneer of humanity. Bacon posed his figures crouching, bending, perching, like trapped animals. His treatment of paint is alive and pulsing like the internal organs of his subjects.
“We live our life through our whole nervous system” he said.
Bacon met Freud met at the end of the WWII and they were almost inseparable from the mid-1950s to early 1970s. Caroline Blackwood, Freud’s second wife from 1953–59, said that Bacon was over for dinner “nearly every night for more or less the whole of my marriage to Lucian". Freud often cited Bacon’s influence on his artistic practice,
“I got very impatient with the way I was working. It was limiting… and I think my admiration for Francis came into this. I realised that by working in the way I did I couldn’t really evolve. The change wasn’t perhaps more than one of focus but it did make it possible for me to approach the whole thing in another way.”
Both artists made portraits of each other. Bacon worked fast - he used to mix his paints on his forearms - and from photographs, skewing and shearing the likeness away from the body, Freud always painted from life. He mercilessly scrutinised his sitters over numerous sessions in his studio during which he slowly built up his trademark layers of thick paint. Both artists used paint to simulate flesh in all its meaty, lumpy, oleaginous glory as if searching, like Shakespeare, for the truth of what it is to be human.
Image Credits
Francis Bacon - Second Version of Triptych 1944, 1988 (Tate)
Francis Bacon - Three Studies of Lucien Freud, 1969 (Private Collection)
Lucien Freud - Portrait of Francis Bacon 1956-7
Such a clever article Gail, I like the way your thinking moves from theatre to paint, from Gielgud and Burton to Freud and Bacon. Hey, that would be a great topic for an art talk - artistic duos, who else can we think of....