Jack Thorne is an established playwright, television writer and screenwriter. He’s a name to look out for and as he’s only forty-five, something I wouldn’t have said fifty years ago; he has plenty more successes to look forward to.
Two things about Jack Thorne you, probably, don’t know: he “degraded” from Pembroke College, Cambridge in his third year, eventually getting a lower second honours degree, and he is autistic. To “degrade” means to drop out to return at a later date. Currently he has two shows on in the West End, one has been playing since 2016, the other opened at the National Theatre last year; they are Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and The Motive and the Cue. As a reader here you don’t need me to steer you to the latter. I went to a matinee yesterday.
On Sunday I had lunch at Daphne’s, an Italian restaurant in Draycott Avenue, SW3, that opened in 1964, where I had last eaten about forty years ago. (For me: squid, veal Milanese and panna cotta.) But who is the eponymous Daphne? She is Daphne Rye (1916 – 1992), director, actress, casting director and restaurateur.
Prices have gone up a little since this photograph was taken and now the menu and decor are both very 21st century Chelsea/Knightsbridge, as are the clientele. But I digress, one of Daphne’s claims to frame is that she promoted the acting career of one of her lodgers: Richard Burton.
In 1964 Burton was Hamlet on Broadway in a production directed by John Gielgud. The Motive and the Cue (a quote from Hamlet’s “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” soliloquy) depicts the fractious relationship between Gielgud and Burton over four weeks of rehearsals. If you have a television you will know Mark Gatiss who plays Sir John Gielgud. I don’t have a television. Johnny Flynn is Richard Burton and Tuppence Middleton is Elizabeth Taylor. I last saw her as Princess Yelena “Hélène” Vasilyevna Kuragina in War and Peace. It is a good play at the Noël Coward Theatre on St Martin’s Lane, the stage on which John Gielgud, aged thirty, played Hamlet in 1934. You can read universally good reviews of Jack Thorne’s 2023 play directed by Sam Mendes elsewhere.
We had excellent seats with a clear view but to begin with three of us had trouble hearing the dialogue – onset of old age – but by the end of the first half I was in the groove. After the interval two women moved back to our row because they couldn’t see properly so close to the stage, so you just can’t win.