Speaking of London theatre double–features and The National’s The Motive and the Cue:

Dear England isn’t the only obvious West End pairing with Jack Thorne’s The Motive and the Cue at the moment; Thorne also wrote When Winston Went to War with the Wireless, now at the Donmar Warehouse. 

The overlaps between the two are legion, but one in particular resonated with me: both productions dedicate a few sequences to restaging old art forms.

The Motive and the Cue imagines what Richard Burton and John Gielgud’s (John Gielgud and Richard Burton’s) 1964 Broadway “rehearsal production” of Hamlet would’ve looked like, at least whilst it was floundering during the rehearsal process. And When Winston Went to War with the Wireless corporealizes early BBC radio broadcasts, showcasing the drastic swings in tone between their lightest entertainment and heaviest news headlines.

Most of the scenes in both plays focus on coloring in the “behind the scenes” of how this art was made, but they still devote a good amount of time to letting modern audiences sit with bygone art forms.