| “Rich” Bio-drama |
Richard Burton |
| Miles Productions- Burton , Aberystwyth Arts Centre , October 21, 2010 |
The physical resemblance is startling. Director Hugh Thomas opens Gwynne Edwards’ play with a light on Rhodri Miles’ tilted face. Faces are rich with different expressions but there is a rightward tilt in which the look of Richard Burton is uncannily caught. That seductive baritone of a voice is inimitable but the tone and phrasing, a stream of syllables on a single outward breath, are superbly rendered. The time is the early 1970’s. Burton, with thirty-three films behind him, is in his exile of a home in Celigny, Switzerland. Rhodri Miles is in thin black polo neck, dark trousers, a cardigan and medallion. A glass never leaves his hand. The decanter on the trolley, replete with soda siphon and gaudy ice bucket, is steadily drained dry. Richard Burton has been dramatised before. Mark Jenkins’ “Playing Burton” played across the world and on the number of performances alone must be the most successful play from Wales of recent times. Its impact relied heavily on the theme of finding or faking identity via the carapace of acting. The metaphor of Doctor Faustus ran throughout. This script is more workmanlike, more rooted in the themes of today. Edwards’ Burton is the personality of a caustic intelligence, the one who revered literature and read a book a day. He looks back at the rancid price of celebrity, where children endure a restless life with semi-strangers and where their education would be better served in the schools of Pontrhydyfen. The play stops short before the third marriage in Botswana. Before then he has described a life in the light of publicity to out-Beckhamise a hundred fold the life of today’s comparable gilded couple. He is damned by the Vatican. Congressmen denounce his immorality and call for his entry visa to be rescinded. He walks away from Hollywood’s most litigious power brokers to do Shakespeare for forty-five pounds a week at the Old Vic. As for the art he is in that point of post-achievement. “The soul begins to stagger with tedium.” The stage is “you against them, not much different from a rugby match.” As for the truly immemorable record of films he holds the purveyors in contempt. In one costume drama he remembers he had to greet Aristotle with the line “what thoughts drive your storm-tossed mind?” The tempest of the personal life is captured in exact detail. A bet is laid on whether he can seduce a particularly glacial actress. He wins the prize, a pint of beer. His first wife cuts out the tabloid articles of his infidelities and glues them to the lavatory wall. The drink never ceases to flow. A persistent theme, as might be expected from a Rhondda-born author, is the undying grip that childhood held upon him. Biographers of Stanley Baker say much the same, that for all the life of Surrey opulence he never left Ferndale nor Ferndale him. The family background is economically and eloquently sketched; the hard-drinking father, the brother down the pit at age thirteen, the mother who “felt every tragedy except her own.” The loyalty to Dylan Thomas is keenly felt as is the remorse over failing to lend him a couple of hundred pounds at a crucial time. There is a sharp aside that R S Thomas had last been known to smile at the age of six. The delight in filming “Under Milk Wood” in Fishguard is total. On the subject of Brando a fellow-drinker says “you make sure you beat him Rich”. Homes and gifts are showered on his family. The ultimate arbiters on his own starry life are always “What will sis say? What will Ifor say?” Underlying it all is the question about his own art. “What’s the point of pretending to be someone else? We hardly know ourselves.” Aberystwyth’s studio was packed with extra rows of seating to meet demand. The audience stood to applaud. |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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