: Angela John
: Behind the Scenes The Dramatic Lives of Philip Burton
: Parthian Books
: 9781917140850
: 1
: CHF 12.90
:
: Biographien, Autobiographien
: English
: 250
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Philip Burton (1904-95) is best remembered as the schoolmaster responsible for training and transforming his pupil Richard Jenkins into Richard Burton, world-famous star of stage and screen. Together they produced a remarkable symbiosis. The stage-struck Philip Burton was present behind the scenes for the rest of the actor's life, intervening at crucial moments to ensure consummate stage performances in, for example, Coriolanus, Hamlet and Camelot. This biography, drawing upon a number of previously unseen sources, provides a fresh angle on this compelling story. And by placing Philip Burton's story centre stage, a remarkable figure also emerges in his own right. In a life that virtually spanned the twentieth century, he demonstrated resilience and transatlantic triumph against the odds. Like his best-known protégé, he was born into an impoverished south Wales mining family. Alongside teaching, he acted, wrote and produced plays and in 1945, with wireless at its height, he became a BBC radio producer. He worked on almost 200 radio programmes, encouraging newcomers and producing work by Dylan Thomas. He wrote scripts for the fledgling television and penned its first 'soap.' Reinventing himself in the mid-1950s, Philip Burton moved to the United States where, after dabbling in the film industry and working as a theatre director, he became the inspirational first director of the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York. He took American citizenship and travelled across the States, delivering sparkling Shakespearean lecture-recitals. He published five books, living in Key West, Florida from the 1970s. Philip Burton died in 1995 aged ninety, his expertise and encouragement having enabled numerous aspiring actors and writers to flourish on both sides of the Atlantic.

Angela V. John is the author/editor of a dozen books. Her biographies include Turning the Tide (Parthian) about Lady Rhondda, and Elizabeth Robins: Staging a Life 1862-1952 (Routledge and The History Press), a study of the American actress, writer and suffragette who popularised Ibsen on the British stage. In 2019 her essay collection Rocking the Boat: Welsh Women who Championed Equality 1840-1990 (Parthian) explored different forms of biographical writing. Behind the Scenes developed out of The Actors' Crucible: Port Talbot and the Making of Burton, Hopkins, Sheen and All the Others (Parthian). Angela now lives in Pembrokeshire but grew up in Port Talbot and first met Richard Burton in 1969. For many years she held the Chair in History at the University of Greenwich, London. She is currently an honorary professor at Swansea University, president of Llafur, the Welsh People's History Society, and of the Port Talbot Musical Theatre Society.

1


Picturing the Young Philip


‘My childhood must have been desperately unhappy, it’s almost a complete blank in my memory’1. was how, many years later in 1968, Philip Burton would describe his early years to the writer Rhys Davies. Such words were hardly the most promising for Philip Burton’s biographer to read. In later life Philip would be part of the literati and ‘glitterati’ and feature frequently in the media. Yet how easy was it going to be to excavate the childhood of one particular working-class boy in a small South Wales mining community in the early years of the twentieth century when the subject himself appeared to have effectively erased it from his memory?

Philip was in his sixties when he made that statement. Although as an adult he kept an appointments diary, it has not survived and reputedly covered five years in one page. He made a habit of destroying letters once read (though fortunately he was an assiduous correspondent and his own letters can be found in many public and private collections). He did write one chapter about his childhood in his volume of (mainly) theatrical memoirs,Early Doors,2. though much was unsaid. It is the silences in life stories that are often most illuminating. Philip was good at silences as well as speech.

His memoir did not include any pictures of people from those early years. Portrait painting was the prerogative of the wealthy and, although Kodak box cameras had been in use since the late nineteenth century, a camera was a luxury item when Philip was growing up. It was a world away from today’s obsession with ‘selfies’ and the validation of identity by posting pictures on social media. Nevertheless, the stage directions for Philip’s early playGranton Street, which Philip said was based on his childhood home, do specifically mention ‘large framed photographs of deceased relatives’ hanging on the parlour walls.3.

Early Doors includes ‘A partial view of Mountain Ash’, a photograph of a coal mine and one of St Margaret’s Church, all significant to Philip’s locale and story buthe is conspicuous by his absence, and this may well have been as much due to a deliberate excising of his troubled early years as to the scarcity of personal photographs from childhood. ‘The College Rugby XV’ at his university is depicted in the book. Philip does not identify himself, tell us the precise date, or even make it clear whether he features there, though he was in the team and there is one strong candidate for the student Burton.

Particularly intriguing was the second part of Philip’s claim about his childhood being ‘almost a complete blank in my memory’. Why and how did he choose to obliterate much about those early years and how might that period help to explain the talented Philip Burton of the better-known decades?

*****

Mountain Ash was Philip’s home town. He was an Edwardian, born on 30 November 1904. His mother, Emma Matilda Mears, came originally from Midsomer Norton in Somerset but her family, like countless others, had gravitated to South Wales in search of work as the demand for coal grew and grew. Her mother was a midwife. Emma became a nurse in a cottage hospital then married John Wilson, a Scots collier. They had a son, William, born in Wattstown in the Rhondda but, after her husband’s early death, the widowed Emma and Will lived with her mother.

Emma remarried. Her second husband was some years younger than herself and one of her mother’s lodgers, an Englishman called Henry Burton.4. He was from a lower middle-class family in the Lichfield area of Staffordshire. A restless man who had twice tried serving in the army, he became a collier. In a television programme made in Key West when Philip was elderly, he explained that his father was the bad boy of his family and that going to the Welsh coalfields was a little like the dash to the Yukon in search of gold.5. ‘Two Strangers’, a short story6. that Philip began writing in 1939 in Port Talbot, opens with a young man from Lichfield, armed with a violin, pacing the platform as he awaits the Bristol and South Wales train. He has run away from home and is both excited and apprehensive as he sets off in search of a new life. This, it seems, was Philip’s imagining of how his father came to Wales.

Mountain Ash lies in the central part of the Cynon Va