| “A Tour de Force...Touching Greatness" |
Welsh National Theatre |
| Playing Burton , Swansea Grand Theatre , December 4, 2025 |
It wasn’t my intention to review this play so I come to it as something of an innocent. My area is dance and music and I rarely review text-based theatre but I was so impressed both by Mark Jenkins' play and by Matthew Rhys’s performance in it last Tuesday, 25th November, that I had to write something about it from my dancer’s eye view.I went to a mid-day show, billed warningly as a “schools performance” but from where I sat it was full house and there was no school child in sight. The audience was definitely grown up and very Swansea, faithful to one of their own, a returning prodigal as it were, for Rhys is from South Wales – Cardiff rather than Swansea – and a first language Welsh speaker. We knew that he understood, on a more profound level, exactly where Richard Burton was coming from. Rhys has done Michael Sheen a great favour in ceding this gap in his diary. The profits from his punishing, sell-out tour of "Playing Burton" will go towards subsidising a first season of the new Welsh National Theatre Sheen has been instrumental in founding. He tells that he messaged Sheen to say he wanted to help and pledged time he had free. But, as a great admirer of the legendary Welsh actor, he had also wanted to do this one-man play for a while, rehearsing it in his New York home during the Covid lockdown. The layering of detail in his interpretation speaks of many hours of thought and work. This is not to say his performance was laboured; far from it, Rhys captures on a physical, almost visceral level the mercurial quality of Burton, man and actor. There’s an unresolved quality about his every move and train of thought, one thing leading into another in a restless, haphazard way. And he gets the voice, that rasping, steely mettle – Rhys’ timbre slightly higher than Burton’s. But Rhys moves with more grace than Burton, carrying his upper body with a freedom and open-ness, to the very tips of his fingers, giving him the means to plumb the inner workings of the man, his gestures somehow conveying that eternally unresolved quality that belies a deep sense of insecurity. The curtain is open on the lit stage as we take our seats. The scene is something like the aftermath of a play reading: a long table, a few chairs oddly angled as if left in haste, a thermos and empty paper cups strewn across some papers, an ashtray overflowing with spent butts, a discarded empty cigarette pack, a red dial telephone and a rather incongruous piano stool set apart from the table. As the house lights go down we hear a bong and a female newsreader announcing Burton’s death at the age of 58 from a cerebral haemorrhage, listing his achievement, then overshadowing it with the sensationalism of his very public private life...but there’s a shout from offstage, “No! No!…” and Rhys charges on, arm raised, protesting that no, that’s not right. Now we understand that this is Burton from the other side of death in some “Huis Clos” type of limbo. Not a purgatory but a place where there is an eternal, unresolved conversation with himself and us (he speaks directly to us as intimates), trying to resolve the unresolveable and at the same time examining the constant question, “Why me?” There’s a lot of material out there: Burton’s re-published diaries – he was an avid diarist and note taker - interviews and documentaries. Many anecdotes, some of them very funny – the Winston Churchill one in particular - and some of them very painful, are woven into the text. Burton was a brilliant raconteur of his own myth and Rhys brilliantly slips in and out of Burton the famous actor into Richie Jenkins, his father, Philip Burton and others from his Pontrhydyfen childhood, becoming that raconteur. Mark Jenkins wrote this monologue using all that readily available material and Matthew Rhys and renowned US director, Bartlett Sher, have created a kind of eternal conversation between Burton and us, his never ending audience. There’s no “fourth wall”, Rhys’s Burton has an intimate, electric connection with us, we become part of his inner dialogue. The incongruous piano stool later serves as a podium to jump onto for speech delivering and as a prop for an acrobatic prat fall when Burton drunkenly (oh, the bottles come out early on) dives into an invisible bath of champagne to illustrate the excesses of life with Liz Taylor’s travelling circus. But “I knew I had to be with her”. On one of the few occasions when the red phone rings we learn it’s Taylor, “How did I know it was you? Because the phone rings differently”. There’s a great sadness underlying the humourous and mercurial savagery of his wit. As we proceed, Rhys becomes more Burton than Burton. Intimate details: his close relationship and love for his older sister who, after his mother dies when he is two, becomes his surrogate, a “black haired, green eyed beauty” whose innocent support and love were immensely important to him and for whom he always yearns, finding at last the answer to her in another “black haired, gypsy beauty” and his passionate and destructive relationship with Elizabeth Taylor. Then there’s the question, did he “sell out” on the possibility of becoming a “great actor”? He refers scathingly to the sniffiness of the UK theatre world towards actors who do movies in the USA rather than live over here and act for peanuts, which may also resonate with Rhys whose career is currently in the US with much TV and film work. And the ultimate sadness of how “the shadow of Richard Burton lengthened and lengthened” until it finally separated altogether from little Richie Jenkins and travelled far away to another continent, leaving the little boy shadowless in South Wales, his identity somehow lost while playing Burton. The play is a real tour de force and Rhys is touching greatness as an actor of subtle intelligence. Perhaps when Welsh National Theatre gets going he will be enticed back to do more in his home country. And take note in this centenary year, when the biopic of the grown-up Burton gets made, Rhys is the man for that lead role. |
Reviewed by: Jenny March |
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