| Playing Burton |
Richard Burton |
| Playing Burton Productions , Wales Millenium Centre , December 17, 2004 |
| This review first appeared in the Wesyern Mail... The cavernous space of the WMC’s studio theatre is not the best venue for a play that consists of an actor imitating another (dead) actor relaxing over a few drinks to tell us about his life: the monologue needs more intimate surroundings if we are to be drawn into the pretence that we are sharing secrets from beyond the grave. And Mark Jenkins’s excellent and very successful Playing Burton really does ask that we believe that we are colluding with the great Welsh actor in an unresolved debate about his roots, his ambitions, his abilities, his sexual drive, his… And it’s very clever because, like all pretences, we don’t actually know any more about Richie Jenkins from Pontryhdyfen than we did before – but we have been entertained and, possibly, made to think about all those questions about identity and performance that to a great extent define postmodern theatre. I say possibly because a dramatic monologue needs to be just right or it falls flat: stop believing in the person speaking to you, whether fiction or real or inbetween, and you end up looking at the fakery, the imitation and the audience-manipulation that’s going on – and, at least on the first night, I did not feel close enough because of the space and I did not accept Brian Mallon as Burton but as a parody dressed in Burton-style roll-neck sweater and shades. Basically it was the voice – or not The Voice. Mallon cannot emulate Burton’s sonorous tones and is a long way from that distinctive version of stage Welsh that, along with Dylan Thomas’s exaggerated readings, defined the accent for millions around the world. Mallon’s accent floats between a strangled English, a touch of Irish, the odd lapse into American and a mostly unsuccessful attempt to copy the mellifluous voice that is forever the First Voice of Under Milk Wood. Things improve after the interval, when Mallon’s confidence builds and he makes a better stab at capturing Burton’s decline and fall and refusal to go gently into that good night – and while he can look uncannily like Burton (as he does look uncannily like Albert Finney at times) he doesn’t have the stature or the presence. I still think Playing Burton is better read than performed, though I look forward to a definitive portrayal from a top actor, and I miss the subtleties, ambiguities and arguments that are there in the writing but here hardly hinted at – where are the internal struggles about guilt, about fame, about repressed homosexuality, about identity, about the selling of his soul to the devil that was Hollywood ? They’re there in Jenkins’s script – emphasised by Burton’s consistent quoting of his role as Faustus - and we hear the words but there is little evidence of that internal self-doubt, the contradictions, the actor’s fear of becoming the parts he plays and not able to separate art from reality, that give this play its richness and helps it transcend mere hagiography.. It’s not an easy task, of course: Brian Mallon has to play Richie Jenkins playing Richard Burton playing Hamlet, Dr Faustus, Antony, Petruchio et al and here in Wales has to convince far more than he has to in LA, Dublin and New York, where he has been highly praised (not least by Norman Mailer). He’s not helped by a clunky and rather sloppy production: poor sound quality, unconvincing costume, an unnecessary interval, a drink that changes colour in that interval and a pile of newspapers that are supposed to contain his obituary notices from 1984 where every one, apart from a black-and-white reproduction Daily Mirror, is clearly (to those that even glance at broadsheets) different sections of the current Guardian: verisimilitude is vital and there’s scant attention to it here. Mind you, the bar upstairs can’t spell Tariff, there’s nothing to tell you that this show is on and despite the staff (predominantly young, attractive, smiling and helpful) obviously having had an intensive course in customer relations, there’s a curiously cold feel to this whole building. Nice brasserie, though. |
Reviewed by: David Adams |
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