Mr Burton – Movie. Dendy Canberra preview August 7 2025.
Reviewed by Frank McKone
Director: Marc Evans
Producer: Trevor Matthews, Ed Talfan, Josh Hyams, Hannah Thomas
Writers: Tom Bullough & Josh Hyams
Cast
Toby Jones as teacher Mr. Burton; Harry Lawtey as his student, Richie Jenkins who becomes Richard Burton.
With Steffan Rhodri, Lesley Manville, Daniel Evans, Aimee-Ffion Edwards, Aneurin Barnard
Rating: Mature themes and coarse language
Film making is an enormous undertaking. For the full cast and crew listing go to IMDb at www.imdb.com/title/tt5171016/fullcredits/
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Whatever
view you may have of the one-time world famous Welsh actor, Richard
Burton, you must see this remarkable movie to appreciate what he really
was like – as an actor and as himself.
The publicity overview is useful, especially if like me you had no idea of Richard Burton’s personal life: Set
against the grit of post-war Wales, MR BURTON is the extraordinary true
story of a working-class boy destined for greatness and the teacher who
saw it first. When Philip Burton, a principled and passionate
schoolteacher in Port Talbot, meets Richie Jenkins, a volatile yet
gifted teen from a fractured home, he recognises a spark that others
have overlooked. Through mentorship, discipline, and love, Philip shapes
Richie’s raw talent, setting him on the path to becoming Richard
Burton, one of the greatest actors of the 20th century.
The
details of Richie Jenkins’ family and how he was brought up by his elder
sister, and his relationship with Philip Burton, form the central
through-line of the drama, which brought me to tears, of fear for his
future and joy for his success as he performed Prince Hal at the
Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford upon Avon in 1951, directed by
Anthony Quayle.
The remarkable thing about the film is how these
actors – particularly in the key roles of Philip Burton and Richie
Jenkins developing into Richard Burton – have to be such wonderful
actors that they can make us believe in these other actors. Philip
Burton realises from Jenkins’ reactions in English class that he has the
capacity to perform but needs to be trained. So we see Richie being
trained in some surprising, sometimes very funny, ways, which means that
we see Toby Jones acting demonstrating how to act, and Harry Lawtey
acting innocently badly until finally he acts Richard Burton acting as
he really did as Prince Hal – after he has acted Richard Burton become a
drunkard and smoker, and telling off Anthony Quayle (played by Daniel
Evans) in rehearsal.
After you’ve seen the movie, and know how
you feel about how Richie Jenkins felt from the age of about 13 to 26,
it’s interesting to read, for example, what his younger brother Graham
Jenkins and other local people told of the family in the setting of the
mining country in Wales in Memories of Richard Burton at https://dramaticheart.wales/our-valleys/afan-valley/richard-burton/memories-of-richard-burton/. And at https://lisawallerrogers.com/tag/richard-burtons-father in Lisa’s History Room there’s more fine detail about Dic Jenkins (played by Steffan Rhodri).
And
I have to confess, only two years after Burton’s first great success in
1951, my English teacher had this 13 year-old, in Form Two, up on stage
in a public reading at Enfield Grammar School – as Prince Hal! Of
course, though I had no Philip Burton to adopt me and change my name, it
is true that that was the beginning of my drama interest and future
academic and teaching career.
And for Canberra readers
especially, it was only last Tuesday that the invited speaker, at our
Canberra Critics’ Circle gathering, was Lexi Sekuless, producer at the
Mill Theatre, whose work is reviewed here. She gave us a fascinating
run-down of her actor training in London, and the differences between
the approach at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), with its more
formal convention – something like the Royal Shakespeare Company style
which Richard Burton faced in Stratford upon Avon – and the more modern
style of the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, where Lexi
acquired the far more varied skills and approaches to characterisation
and staging styles which we see in Mill Theatre’s production of Enron, finishing shortly.
Watching
Richie Jenkins under Philip Burton’s tutelage reminded me of Lexi
Sekuless’s explanation of how that Central approach had broken actors
away from the other famous technique – the American Method – and how
working all these ways through in Australia has resulted nowadays in a
kind of practical strength in our actors who do so well in the modern
film industry.
And, I suspect the acting in this film, made in
Wales – not in the English establishment setting – has some of that
flair that we have in Australia. Whether you thought you liked Richard
Burton with Elizabeth Taylor or not, you can’t not like Harry Lawtey
with Toby Jones, with the women, Lesley Manville and Aimee-Ffion Edwards
as Ma Smith (Philip Burton’s landlady) and Cis (Richie’s sister) who
held the real Richie together and whose acting hold the movie together,
in my view.
Not to be missed – from August 14th.
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| Toby Jones as teacher Mr. Burton; Harry Lawtey as his student, Richie Jenkins |
©Frank McKone, Canberra
