I have spent most of my life avoiding writing about real people. In fact, as a screenwriter, I’ve made half a career out of avoiding it. I wrote pieces that were almost about real people, but not quite. With my Channel 4 dramas National Treasure, Kiri and Help, out of necessity I wrote towards the truth but didn’t embrace it utterly. With National Treasure I wrote about historic sex crimes and referenced famous sex offenders, but didn’t write of them because to do so was very legally and ethically complicated and might involve upsetting or worsening the damage already done to victims. With Kiri we risked disrupting ongoing legal cases. With Help I wanted to write about care homes during the pandemic without exposing any one of them to unwelcome scrutiny.
As a dramatist this puts you in a difficult position: how do you make something feel true, but not be true? But it also gives you latitude to find a way into the story from an angle of your choosing. You talk to people, you uncover things, you try to represent stories as best you can.
Recently, however, I have been drawn to real events. I find myself writing about real people. Some historical, some current, all complicated. That dual obligation, which better writers than me have struggled with, of telling something that is engaging and true. Having an obligation to your subjects that goes beyond your obligation as a storyteller and perhaps even your obligation to the truth as you understand it is terrifying, for me at least.
With real people you have to feel their breath as they tell their story to you, and you have to feel their breath as you (later) tell them the way you will tell their story. Last year I co-wrote a drama with Genevieve Barr called Then Barbara Met Alan about the disabled rights movement. Alan and Barbara are heroes to both of us, but in order to tell their story properly we had to show the raw reality of them. Did they like that exposure? Not all of it. But we adjusted our story and ended up with something that represented them in a way they were brave enough to be comfortable with.
Later this month, we begin previewing a play I’ve written for the National Theatre about Sir John Gielgud directing Richard Burton playing Hamlet on Broadway in 1964. The idea first came from Sam Mendes and he directs it. The play contains, by necessity, Gielgud, Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Hume Cronyn, Eileen Herlie, William Redfield and many, many more. Figures that are iconic, figures that lots of people have a history with, either in person or in passion.
How do you do justice to these incredible figures? How do you feel able to do justice to them? Particularly in a single evening. These are questions I’ve really struggled with.
There are two accounts of that original rehearsal period. Both are very interesting works. One by Redfield, the actor playing Guildenstern, which takes the form of letters he wrote to a friend detailing the process. The other by Richard Sterne, a “Gentleman” in the show, who went to extraordinary lengths to get accurate recordings of the rehearsals as they took place. There are also numerous biographies and written materials about all the major figures, as well as Burton’s diaries and Gielgud’s letters.
It was a very difficult production. Burton behaved badly because he didn’t get the direction from Gielgud he felt he required. Or perhaps because he got more direction than he expected. The two, who were prior friends, couldn’t work out how their Hamlet might work. What was Burton trying to do playing him? He was the most famous actor in the world by this point – he and Elizabeth Taylor literally invented the paparazzi with their glamour – so why put on a hair shirt when he could be earning millions doing something less taxing?
Gielgud, in contrast, was on his uppers: Laurence Olivier was running the National, the Royal Shakespeare Company weren’t much interested in him, and the Royal Court and “modern theatre” was increasingly dominating the West End. He took the job because he didn’t have many other offers. The easy thing to do would have been to allow Burton to dominate. But Hamlet mattered to Gielgud, he’d played him quite definitively more than 300 times, and he wouldn’t let it go. Disaster quickly loomed.
Sam Mendes said two things in particular that really stuck with me as I tried to write the play. The first was that he wanted it to be something which took people inside a genuine rehearsal process. This was the height of lockdown and both of us were desperate to be back inside a rehearsal room; he wanted to explain the process of making a play and make it feel dynamic. How do you reflect on a process which aims to reflect life? The second was that this was to be about classical theatre meeting modern ideas. Gielgud was the epitome of tradition, looking back to his aunt Ellen Terry and her theatrical partner Henry Irving; Burton was bursting to be modern, while paradoxically yearning for ideals of classical theatre.
They spend the play dancing around the notion of how to play Hamlet. A character so beautifully written he can be played a thousand different ways. They are trying to find Burton’s Hamlet. To do so they have to pull strips off themselves and each other. And this, hopefully, is our key to telling a story that goes beyond the theatre, and becomes instead a character study of what we hide and what we don’t. What we want the world to see within us and what we don’t. The play gets inside their shame, their ambition, their ego and their destruction.
Our title The Motive and the Cue is a quote from Hamlet’s “O, what a rogue and peasant slave” speech. Broken down by Gielgud in the play, the motive is Hamlet’s reason for a given act, the cue is the passion behind that act. They can’t answer Hamlet’s motive, nor his cue, without addressing their own.
In my experience of writing, you can never escape the why of why you’re telling the story, why you are the writer. The same is true of your pure fiction, of books you might adapt, and even of true events. Sometimes you know the why, sometimes it’s a surprise you find out halfway through, other times others may see something of you in it that you cannot. Gielgud has a constant refrain in the play about the character and the actor; the actor is trapped with the character, but so is the character trapped with the actor. I feel the same way about writing. That sadly these people are lumped with me (and luckily Sam, too) as I try to refract their lives. I’ve looked for their truth, and their shame, and these characters feel my truth and shame through my writing of them. Just as Burton finds his Hamlet, Sam and I have hopefully found our Burton, Taylor and Gielgud, and it is such a pleasure to see the magnificent Johnny Flynn, Tuppence Middleton and Mark Gatiss find them in the rehearsal room.
I hope we’ve found something honest, something compelling, something that truly gets inside the process of making a story, and most importantly something that feels like them. That expresses how magnificent and how damaged they all were. Because the fact of Taylor, Gielgud and Burton being sadly gone doesn’t give us the licence to express their hidden truths however we like. This production is about them in their rawest states, and I hope we’ve been true to those states. I hope that we have shown them the same love as if we had to face them across a cafe or down a Zoom lens. We’ve felt an obligation to them and I hope our fascination with them reveals a play people want to see.
The Motive and the Cue is at the National Theatre: Lyttelton, London, 20 April to 15 July.
