Review: MR BURTON, in cinemas

Richard Burton was that rarest of beasts - a British actor equally acclaimed on stage and screen, a bona fide Hollywood star and an A list celebrity who lived pretty much the whole of his adult life in the glare of the paparazzi’s flashbulbs. Like so many who flew that close to so bright a sun, he was downed by the booze at the young age of 58. That said, he’ll live forever, these days on YouTube, polo-necked and smoking on chat shows, fixing his host with an eye that was always a tell-tale window on to a hard-lived life.

How did it all happen? Marc Evans’ not quite hagiographic biopic goes part of the way to answering that question. We meet the Welsh icon first in his Port Talbot wartime classroom, gauche, a bit rebellious, but bright and already interested enough in literature to read it in lunch breaks, leaning on a wall while the steel works belch ash overhead and the mines grind men’s lungs to dust below. 

Like so many working class lads, a moment arrives when the old life must be left behind and the new life embraced. Richard Jenkins’ teacher, PH Burton, having already taken his prodigy under his wing (indeed, under his roof) pulls strings to get the lad an RAF Oxford scholarship, but it requires him to change his name. His father, a hard-drinking miner, essentially sells him for £50 and one wonders just how much of an impact that had on a teenager as confused as any other about his place in the world. A little teenage sex with a blonde bombshell resolves some doubts, and perhaps the whole identity shifting helped him to inhabit so many roles on and off the stage and screen, Inevitably, it seeded as much bad as good in an adolescent psychology.

Harry Lawtey plays Richard as well as could be expected. Now that sounds condescending, but such was Burton’s natural ability to project charisma - surely his most defining characteristic - its alchemy can only be approached by another actor. We see some of it in Burton’s 1951 Henry V at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, when, despite going through something of an existential crisis with a bottle always at hand, the power of his unique presence comes through. The parallels between the carousing young prince suddenly thrust into assuming responsibilities as a king and the carousing young actor suddenly assuming responsibilities as a star, are (mercifully) left largely unsaid.

As one might expect of a very different actor to Burton, but perhaps his inheritor of the role as the leading exponent of his craft in the UK today, Toby Jones is compelling as PH Burton, the teacher who gives everything to the younger man in order to live out his thwarted dreams through his gifted charge. PH certainly risked a lot and got a lot from the relationship, something Richard, as is a young man’s wont, only recognised much later - but at least the reconciliation was then lifelong, captured in a pre-credits photograph of the odd couple. Jones does his best work in holding back his (almost certainly platonic) love for the younger man, but never plays down either the risk in such a relationship, nor the fulfillment it brought.

There are lovely scenes despite some CGI backdrops that show, if we needed to be told, that regional BBC budgets are no match for Netflix and Amazon. 

Up above the valleys, Richard shouts and shouts until he finds the voice from the diaphragm, the foundation of that immortal, unique instrument. He is also inducted into the strange ways of middle class manners by Lesley Manville, underused as PH Burton’s landlady, the middle-aged couple lonely and dependent on each other, but too decorous to do anything about it. I recall being told how to eat ‘properly’ myself, a rite of passage for any working class lad about to move into middle class circles. 

Daniel Evans, currently co-artistic director of the RSC, delivers a fine turn as an exasperated, very thespy Anthony Quayle attempting to rein in Burton’s burgeoning ego, the insecurity manifesting, as it so often does, in a selfish arrogance. Actors eh? 

The Diaries provides a fuller picture of Burton growing up but this pleasing, if hardly revelatory, movie is well crafted, honouring a great, if flawed man, appropriately and provides a reminder, were one needed, that talent can bubble up anywhere but always needs fostering if it is to bloom. 

I suspect it’ll be shown on BBC1 at 9pm in November, a sentimental marking of the centenary of the actor’s birth. And quite right too - it’s not as though we’ll see the likes of him again.

Mr Burton is on general release in UK cinemas now