With a side glance at Laurence Olivier’s style, he tells Burton, beamingly: “You shout wonderfully.” I could have fuelled the show with the steam coming from my ears, exasperated in proportion to the nobleness of the endeavour Thorne has slightly underwritten the actor’s mercurial intelligence – his gift for expression was actually of a piece with his famous gaffes – but the charm, the pathos and the sudden skewering wit are finely caught. Caught in silhouette, slightly rocking backwards, he might seem to be the man himself. And Mark Gatiss as Gielgud is a mellifluous marvel. Though Tuppence Middleton’s Taylor lacks purr (a line about being “a vulgarian” would be better delivered as if it were a sly lie), Johnny Flynn’s Burton has cutting allure, not least when having to appear sloshed in white underpants: when he finally stops yelling his soliloquies, he makes you long for more. Still, there is another centre of vitality: the acting.
The effect is not so much urgency and development as a series of arresting tableaux. Shakespeare speeches (mostly from Hamlet, though Juliet also gets a go) are interspersed between rehearsals: they are often finely delivered, not least by Janie Dee as Gertrude, but rarely meshed tellingly into the action. Movies and theatre are cleverly interleaved, as in Burton’s career, with scenes separated by the opening and closing of a screen like a camera shutter, and quotations from Hamlet (the title is one of these) flashed up between episodes. Mark Gatiss, ‘a mellifluous marvel’ as John Gielgud.
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