Cultural highlights 2025: Philip Burton’s dramatic lives

Rajvi Glasbrook 

I read ‘Behind the Scenes: The Dramatic Lives of Philip Burton’ over Easter, aware even then that it was going to be one of my 2025 highlights.  

Angela V Johns is a fine biographer. Philip Burton’s life is recounted in a way that is detailed and dignified. She retains the focus fully on Burton, even whilst richly presenting a context teeming with figures whose lives have warranted multiple biographies of their own. 

In a year that has seen much celebration of Philip’s Burton’s protégé, Richard Burton, this biography adds a valuably fair view on the complexities of Philip’s role as mentor and friend to Richard, but in the main it presents an illuminating recount of Philip Burton’s own polymathic versions of self, as a highly successful playwright, radio producer, actor, stage director, novelist, lecturer and man of letters. 

We are taken chronologically from Philip Burton’s beginnings in Mountain Ash, to his reinvention in Port Talbot’, to London and his time with the BBC, to the lecture circuit in the U.S. 

Burton’s childhood is redolent of sadness. “My childhood must have been desperately unhappy, it’s almost a complete blank in my memory,’ he related to Rhys Davies. Although he didn’t keep letters, recipients kept Burton’s letters. In one such missive he remembered having to ‘bear the burden of a widowed and ageing mother, and that permanently crippled me in more ways than one.’ In a volume of his memoirs, ‘Early Doors’, he conveyed that he was lacking friends and ‘much too bright for my own happiness.’ Although, as Johns notes, there is much that is unsaid about Burton’s earlier days too – ‘Philip was good at silences as well as speech.’ 

Conversely, not silence but words were Burton’s constant strength, throughout his time, and Johns shows how he used them to enrich himself as well as the people in his life, be they real or fictional. 

In his first and arguably best known play, ‘Granton Street’, Burton echoed George Bernard Shaw’s way of giving ‘the best arguments to those with whom he disagreed’. Burton’s success and output with the BBC in Wales and then London were prolific – ‘Barely a week went by without one of Philip’s programmes being broadcast.’ 

John is strong on presenting the contemporaries and scene around the BBC as well as wider Welsh cultural life of this time. Here an interesting passage about J.O. Francis’ play, ‘Change’, there an apt anecdote about Aneirin Talfan Davies or T. Rowland Hughes

The earlier days of Burton’s time in the US are presented as ‘a protracted game of snakes and ladders’. In March 1964, he finally became a citizen of the U.S., a period which coincided with his rift from Richard Burton.

That the book’s publication coincided with Marc Evans’ film, ‘Mr Burton’, has been fortunate. The telling of Philip Burton’s life and myriad accomplishments has been long overdue. Parthian published the paperback of ‘Behind the Scenes’ this month and it is of good quality, with particularly good photographs, notably those taken by Angela V John herself.

This is a thorough and engaging work, and admirable for the way it avoids speculation or sensationalism, and presents the life of an occasionally misunderstood and quietly extraordinary man in his singularity.

Behind the Scenes: The Dramatic Lives of Philip Burton by Angela V. John is published by Parthian.