| Critical, Intelligent, Warm: the Burton Diaries Launch |
Richard Burton |
| Chris Williams and Dai Smith , Taliesin Arts Centre , November 29, 2012 |
“Intellectual” snorts the army general “And he’s Welsh.” The line occurs eight minutes into the Nicholas Ray film “Bitter Victory” (1957) and Richard Burton’s character, Captain Leith, is being considered as to suitability to lead a dangerous commando mission. Naturally he is turned down. The two adjectives together are appropriate for the warm, intelligent, celebratory but unfawning launch of the “Diaries” in Wales.The date for the launch, explains Chris Williams, was set before the precise date of the book’s publication had been settled. As it has happened it has been a return home after events West and East, from Singapore to California. Ioan Gruffydd has been on hand to read in Los Angeles. In New York City Matthew Rhys took the part of Burton. Chris Williams has given fourteen radio interviews the preceding day, starting with a station in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His appearance on NBC’s morning news show was watched by five million. The publishers are indicating forty thousand sales in hardback by Christmas. That makes a paperback inevitable, and that is apart from the number of downloads. Swansea University has a hit on its hands. Just as Mark Jenkins’ “Playing Burton” is Wales’ most successful play in recent times, the “Diaries” are set to be the most successful book. Dai Smith begins with a warm, incisive, personally felt introduction. It is revealed that the Smith and Williams connection goes back to a time when a young PhD student was called to come round and change his supervisor’s car tyre. What is palpable is the sense of connection that Burton represents. An audience member laments the fact of the burial in Switzerland. Williams, in Burton’s defence, says that Celigny, and his adored book room, were where he experienced most happiness. (Burton’s most recent biographer also makes claim that the Revenue at the time considered a return for burial as a return for tax purposes also.) Dai Smith’s sense for Burton’s unshakable Welshness expresses itself in the phrase that, for all the mega-stardom, he remained “Port Talbot rapscallion Dicky Jenkins” all his life. Mark Jenkins on a panel two weeks ago was of the view that Burton lacked the focus to be a writer. That may or may not be the case, but the “Diaries” on the evidence of the readings are his literary epitaph. A scion of a distinguished German aristocratic lineage is likened to spaghetti, “soft and round.” “I shall die” he confides of “drink and make-up.” The passion for language pervades: “My chief enjoyment after love-making is a good poem.” An allusion to Yeats slips in alongside a comment about “this little shrinking Welsh violet.” Dai Smith firmly locates Burton in “a vocal culture that aspires to break out and speak to the world." Contributors rise in eloquence to fit the man that they celebrate. Old friend Robert Hardy has been present at the Cheltenham Festival launch; he testifies that the “Diaries” are the man in all his “glory, horror and vivid imagination.” Chris Williams describes the work that he has meticulously edited as “funny, self-lacerating and poignant.” The launch closes with a showing of Zeffirelli’s noisy, operatic “Taming of the Shrew”- Petruchio even bursts into song on his wedding night to a full orchestra. It is a good choice for at least four reasons. It is in the top five most enduring from the catalogue of seventy films. It is one of the three films where Burton also played a producer role. It features Victor Spinetti as a wet and foppish Hortensio. Most of all it is the film that connects to the blazing young Shakespearean actor. Although just in his forties the entry of his Petruchio has an energy that escapes “Where Eagles Dare”. There is a lovely moment where, in the wooing of Kate, his eyelids slowly close and re-open. It is a brilliant piece of screen acting expressiveness. The art is what matters. Meanwhile the Western Mail of November 25 reports that a star-heavy bio-pic is in pre-production. “Drama” is too ennobling a term for a genre that is indolent, easy, unimaginative and parasitical. In elevating the salesman over the drama-maker it undermines the argument for public service television altogether. Television viewers this year have already had to put up with the futile “Burton: Y Gyfrinach”. The production’s intention is to pick on a piece of acting that did not work. Its motivations are small-mindedness, and the values of the tabloid. Public service television is a great, big, lovable, annoying, indispensable beast. Denmark would not waste drama resources on bio-bics. “It's shabby” a family member is quoted as saying. Permission for use of the “Diaries” in the making of trash culture has been withheld. Burton the actor is there to see in the film record. Burton the man is there in the “Diaries” and the biographies of Melvyn Bragg and Paul Ferris. Other exploitation, with its intention of belittlement, is both redundant and impertinent. |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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