Theatre review: Playing Burton at the Reardon Smith, Cardiff

Jon Gower

It’s been sixteen years since the actor Matthew Rhys has been on stage, keeping himself busy in the States with TV series such as The Americans and Brothers and Sisters rather than treading the boards.

But with a gap in his recording schedule he returned to Wales for this one-man show and fundraiser for the nascent Welsh National Theatre – and a veritable homecoming tour de force at that, taking in the London Old Vic and Burton’s home village of Pontrhydyfen, and also Bangor, Cardigan, Wrexham and Aberystwyth, culminating in a three-show run at the Swansea Grand, thus underlining the national part of the company’s title.

It’s an exhausting schedule but Rhys was happy to do it as a way of making his contribution to the new company.

On reason for this is that he and WNT’s artistic director Michael Sheen go way back. They once shared a place in Kilburn, where they almost bought a pub together, while Rhys later found temporary lodgings in Sheen’s home in Los Angeles.

Not that it needs saying, but these are global talents fully intent on creating a top class company which creates opportunities for others like the ones they themselves were given. In a country which clearly means the world to them.

Achingly funny

Mark Jenkins’ 1994 play – which I last saw performed by Josh Richards and directed by Guy Masterson over two decades ago – is an elegantly crafted, lapidary piece, weaving in quotations from the likes of Marlowe and Shakespeare with telling stories from Burton’s life.

These include an achingly funny account of his grandfather’s accident in a wheelchair and about Burton’s operatic, tortuous love affair with Elizabeth Taylor, which became as legendary as that of Anthony and Cleopatra.

Playing Burton gives us the basic biography of the young lad from Pontrhydyfen who was inspired by the tutelary spirit of Philip Burton, who not only encouraged his gifts as an actor an academic student but gave him the name under which he would become notoriously famous and famously notorious.

Richard Burton was a man who self-confessedly fell in love with vowels and was fiercely entranced by the English language, which took him to Oxford University and led to a fuller understanding of the texts he studied and the roles he inhabited.

‘Playing Burton’ finds the aging actor in his Swiss tax haven, sluicing back a couple of bottles of vodka a day and pondering the shipwreck of his life – the broken marriages, the seemingly squandered talent, the off-the-graph drinking.

He recalls, with deep regret insulting Sir Laurence Olivier whilst pissed and bristles as he reads his own obituaries, which suggest he wasn’t so much a great actor but rather the almost man. The reputational damage was caused by a run of shlocky movies of which Burton was painfully aware. As Mark Jenkins’ lines put it: ‘As a boy I would collect sheep dung and sell it in buckets to gardeners… years later I’d be selling it for millions!’

Range of pace

Matthew Rhys gives us all the complexities as he unpacks the cracked Russian doll of Burton’s life, employing the full gamut of the actor’s craft, ranging from quiet nuance to declaiming classical lines with real gusto. Directed by Bartlett Sher, this eminently portable production had precious little in the way of props – a table and chair, a stool, a telephone, a briefcase, a well-thumbed complete works of William Shakespeare – so that the weight of the evening was all on Rhys, who had a great range of pace, from stately and exquisitely enunciated excerpts of plays to fast running streams of consciousness as Burton reeled in the years even as reeled because of too much booze. Constitution of an ox doesn’t come close.

Burton’s story has more than a modicum of sadness. Here was a man who thrived in company but became too famous to just go out for a pint. Indeed at one point he and Taylor had to employ machine-gun armed bodyguards to thwart kidnappers.

Teetering crown

Playing Burton isn’t an impression of Burton, a man whose baritone voice is patently unmatchable, once described as ‘floating fire’ but, rather, a superb intimation of what it was to be a man tortured by the acting crown he was given and one harrowed by fears it wasn’t really his or that he had somehow besmirched it by being profligate with his talents.

As Rhys explained in a newspaper interview: ‘As professional a Welshman as Burton was, his place in the world and the firmament was always one of complexity and challenge to him.’ The deep Welshness of this twelfth son of a twelve-pint-a-day father was famously summed up by Burton himself when he said he ‘would rather have played for Wales at Cardiff Arms Park than Hamlet at the Old Vic.’

Self-doubting superstar

Rhys’ voice is, of course different from Burton, who, for starters, smoked like a Port Talbot steelworks chimney – and reminds one of poet Peter Finch’s assertion that ‘if God hadn’t meant us to smoke he wouldn’t have given us’ lungs.’ Yet Matthew Rhys totally inhabits a man who was larger than life and deeply ravaged by self-doubt.

This was the superstar who earned a million dollars for a single Broadway run, who maybe cheapened himself by starring in Where Eagles Dare and certainly did so in a film that Michael Sheen recommends, namely Staircase, in which Burton plays alongside Rex Harrison as a pair of gay barbers in London’s East End.

A miscellany of voices

But there are other voices in the mix in Playing Burton, so Rhys gave us a busy cast including walk-ons for tutor Phillip Burton and Burton’s fellow dedicated toper Dylan Thomas, the litigious Hollywood producer Darryl F. Zanuck, a Welsh minister fully charged up with hwyl and even the stentorian, bottle-of-brandy-a-day Winston Churchill who once showed up in Burton’s dressing room and asked to use the toilet. Rhys delivers a vivid range of voices, moving deftly from one to the other, melding them all effortlessly.

We have the German physician Franz Anton Mesmer to thank for giving us the right word to describe Rhys’ performance. It was simply mesmerising, an actor at the top of his game, paying homage to another great. It fully deserved the standing ovation, a salute to two magisterial actors both undeniable in their talents, to Matthew Rhys and Richard Burton who both seemingly took a bow at one and the same time. Such is the ineffable magic of theatre.