The Latest Breaking News from Sam Mendes

Rufus Norris’s departure from the National Theatre leaves a gap at the top of British Theatre but there is no shortage of potential successors.

After more than a decade running Regent’s Park Open Air theatre, the hit-making director is to take over the Covent Garden venue next year

“There’s been no shortage of stage portrayals of real life VIPs in the past couple of years,” said Clive Davis in The Times. Jack Thorne’s “thoughtful, often wickedly droll” new play, about the relationship between Richard Burton and John Gielgud during rehearsals for a 1964 production of Hamlet on Broadway,…

Sam Mendes reignites Gielgud and Burton’s Broadway Hamlet; a climate crisis play is powered by bikes (and eco-shaming); Timberlake Wertenbaker has fun with Jules et Jim; and Rhiannon Neads hits escape velocity

The star of hot new Sam Mendes play The Motive and the Cue talks fame, fraught rehearsals and theatre’s big culture shift. By Alexandra Jones

Mark Gatiss is superb as Sir John Gielgud in Jack Thorne’s affecting play about Hamlet rehearsals with Richard Burton

Sam Mendes was inspired to commission The Motive and the Cue after finding a book on the tumultous 1964 staging of Hamlet on Broadway - now it’s at the National Theatre

And what a lying, cheating, adulterous bunch they are

The Motive and the Cue depicts John Gielgud’s struggle to direct Richard Burton in Hamlet on Broadway. Its writer describes the task of putting his words into such celebrated mouths

This year has seen the release of a varied collection of nostalgic films about film making. Damien Chazelle’s Babylon looks at the excesses of 1920s and 30s Hollywood; Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans explores the position of film in the director’s own childhood in the 1960s, and Sam Mendes’ Empire of…

With cinematography by Roger Deakins and performances from Olivia Colman and Micheal Ward, Empire of Light captures the vintage splendour of England’s past