Theatre review: The Motive and the Cue

The National Theatre has lured a couple of the most commercially successful British playwrights amd screenwriters to the South Bank to premiere new shows this season, starting with Jack Thorne in the Lyttelton, with stage and screen director Sam Mendes at the helm of a play about screen stars, and what draws them to the stage. The Motive and the Cue is inspired by the real story of Richard Burton (Johnny Flynn,) who in the middle of the honeymoon for (one of) his marriages to Elizabeth Taylor (Tuppence Middleton) went to Broadway to rehearse for Hamlet. John Gielgud (Mark Gatiss) had already become a legendary Shakespearean actor by his mid-20s, but by 1964 and at the age of 60 his glory days seem to be far behind him.

Theatre review: Taken at Midnight

With the true scale of Hitler's plan years away from becoming generally known, the 1930s saw many in Germany start to fear their chancellor was far more dangerous than he appeared, but the world at large wasn't yet willing to risk taking action against him. In Mark Hayhurst's Taken at Midnight, one dissenting voice within Germany is Jewish lawyer Hans Litten (Martin Hutson,) who in a case against the Nazi party's militant Brownshirts dared to call Hitler himself to the witness stand. It was a deliberate humiliation that wouldn't be forgotten: Once the party come to power, Hans is arrested in the night and imprisoned "for his own protection." As the Nazis' power becomes absolute, he is moved from concentration camp to concentration camp, tortured for information on his former clients. His mother Irmgard, meanwhile, doggedly pursues the SS for news of her son, campaigning for his safe release.