The way Matthew Rhys tells it, from his Brooklyn Heights apartment in New York, he had no choice but to return to his native Wales this autumn. “It’s as if all the planets were aligned,” says the Cardiff-born actor, 50, who has spent most of the past 20 years starring in American-made films and TV series such as The Americans, Brothers & Sisters and Perry Mason. “First, it’s the 100th anniversary of Richard Burton’s birth. Second, Michael Sheen’s brilliant Welsh National Theatre project is gearing up for its launch and I wanted to do something to raise funds for it. And third, I had a ten-day window this November when I could go to Wales and do the play—which I’ve actually been preparing for years.”
The play is Mark Jenkins’s Playing Burton. As the title suggests, it’s a 90-minute monologue, directed by the Tony award-winning Bartlett Sher, in which the actor portrays his Welsh predecessor looking back over what Rhys calls “the great rollercoaster” of his life.
“It lets you into a more introspective Burton than perhaps we are used to,” Rhys says. “And it probes those difficult questions about him. Why did he drink so much? Why did his relationships, with Liz Taylor and others, so often fall apart?”
The tour will open in London at the Old Vic, the theater in which Burton played some of his greatest stage roles, then take Rhys to a string of venues across Wales, ending in Bethel Chapel Cafe in Pontrhydyfen, Burton’s birthplace. Reaching out to “the four corners of the realm”, as Rhys puts it, is intended as a foretaste of what Sheen’s company wants to do for Wales.
As Rhys cheerily admits, the project is a double challenge for him. The first is getting back into live theater after all those screen roles—notably his Emmy award-winning turn as a Russian secret agent alongside Keri Russell, his real-life partner, in the 75 episodes of The Americans. Like Burton, Rhys cut his teeth in live theater before moving into TV and films, but this play will mark his first time back on stage for 13 years.
“Yup, I’m terrified,” he says. “And the fact that I will be entirely by myself on stage makes it even more daunting. If I forget my words I will be truly at sea. But this is what I originally trained to do, so I guess it’s like giving my acting technique a kind of MoT. You know, how are the old muscles working after all these years?”
And the second challenge, of course, is portraying Burton. “I’m still wrestling with how much I should try to imitate his voice,” Rhys says. “When you listen to him you think, ‘God, even attempting to come close to that incredible baritone will do him a disservice.’ It was a unique instrument. I think it was the critic Ken Tynan who said that when Burton came on stage he ‘brought his own cathedral with him’. On the other hand, I think we have to make some kind of nod towards the voice—a flavor of it anyway.”
Where does Rhys rate Burton in his personal pantheon of Welsh heroes? “You mean alongside Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones, Barry John, Siân Phillips, Gareth Edwards and Rachel Roberts—the true gods? For me, Burton was always No 1. In my formative years I watched him playing Jimmy Porter in the film of Look Back in Anger, and it was one reason I became an actor.”
And was Burton’s incredible determination also inspiring? After all, he pulled himself up by his bootstraps from very humble beginnings. “Yes, that’s one of the most intriguing things about him,” Rhys says. “He did have this almost aggressive confidence, this way of saying to the world, ‘I will take you by the scruff of the neck and make you notice me.’ That’s actually a very un-Welsh quality. I sometimes think humbleness is a religion in Wales. And Burton also wasn’t embarrassed by wealth, which is another thing that isn’t very Welsh.”
So what accounted for his alcoholism and inability to form lasting relationships with women he undoubtedly loved? “God, those are big, open-ended questions and I’m not sure I have the answers,” Rhys replies. “But all his life he was haunted by a number of things. One was his very challenging childhood. He lost his mother when he was two and had a very complex relationship with his father and eldest brother. I think he had a strong sense of being abandoned by his parents, even though he was wonderfully nurtured by Philip Burton [his teacher and legal guardian, whose surname he adopted].
“Then there was his ambivalence about his fame. He was the first British actor to achieve the sort of celebrity status where your marriages are discussed on the floor of the US Senate and your divorces condemned by the Vatican. When you are knocking Khrushchev off the front pages you know you have the whole world watching you. That must have created an incredible pressure.”
And was there also the pressure of being one of the first genuinely working-class actors at a time when the British theater was dominated by supremely self-assured patricians such as Olivier and Gielgud? “Yes, he felt he had somehow accidentally avoided his destiny — to be a coal miner like his brothers — and instead walked into a world where, as he often joked, he found himself wearing tights on the stage of the Old Vic. At a deep level I think that was an embarrassment to him. Perhaps his heavy drinking was a way of proving his manliness.”
Was there also, in Burton’s later years, an element of guilt about his career — that he had sold himself short as an actor by accepting so many lucrative but undemanding roles in movies? “Definitely,” Rhys agrees. “You have to remember what an incredible Shakespearean actor he had been. He still holds the record for the longest run as Hamlet on Broadway—137 performances.
His Henry V, his Coriolanus, his Prince Hal are still revered. So when he went into movies there was a kind of consensus in Britain that the prince had abdicated, that he hadn’t fulfilled his potential, that he had somehow done himself a disservice by going to Hollywood and making millions. I think that really got under his skin.”
Rhys himself grew up in a Welsh-speaking household and has long supported the view that, after 700 years of English domination, it’s time for Wales to proclaim its independence. “Yes, I’m one of those who believe that it all went to shit in 1284,” he says. “Listen, I’ve been shot down on this a million times, especially by those who say, ‘What right do you have to speak about Wales when you don’t live here any more?’ I reply that I still care about the country I come from. And there’s no doubt we’ve had a rough time. So I just wonder whether it would be better for us to go it alone. Smaller nations than us have done that.”
Wasn’t he planning to make a film about Owain Glyndwr, the Welsh leader who led a 15-year revolt against the English in the early 1400s? “I still haven’t ruled it out,” he says. “I tried to get major Hollywood studios interested, but they always said, ‘This is just a Welsh version of Braveheart.’ I would reply: ‘So what? Braveheart was 30 years ago.’”
And the kilt budget would be a lot smaller. “Exactly,” Rhys says, laughing. “It would be a lot warmer for the actors. I do believe that we Welsh people have a duty to tell our own stories on stage and screen. Especially as we have really good stories to tell.”
In fact the story of Owain Glyndwr will get told next year. A new “epic play” by Gary Owen, titled Owain & Henry, will be one of two new productions mounted by Welsh National Theatre in its inaugural season, with Sheen starring in both. (The other is Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.)
What does Rhys think about how Wales is generally looking after its traditional strongholds? From the savage cuts to Welsh National Opera—particularly painful in the “land of song”—to the long series of defeats inflicted on the once-mighty Welsh rugby team, it all looks a bit grim at the moment, doesn’t it?
“Here’s what I think about the rugby,” Rhys declares, and I brace myself for a tirade. “I’m a child of the Eighties so I’ve lived through the peaks and troughs of Welsh rugby over decades. And I continue to think that as a country of three million people we are still punching above our weight.”
Really? New Zealand’s population isn’t much bigger, but they always seem to produce world-class teams. “But they can pull in all those South Sea islanders,” Rhys counters. “The only island we can call on is Anglesey.”
And what about the problems of the Welsh cultural scene, compounded by a Welsh government that gives far less money to the arts, per head of population, than Scotland or England? “Well, what I’ve loved seeing is how that has sparked creative responses, of which the new theater company set up by Michael [Sheen] is the prime example,” Rhys replies. “In difficult times like these you really want to nail your identity as a country to the mast, which is what he’s doing magnificently.”
Rhys himself has played a small but vital part in preserving the traditional Welsh way of life by helping to save a pub from closure in Pennal, the mid-Wales village where his father came from. “It’s vital that pubs don’t close because so often they are the focal points of a community,” he says. “And funnily enough Pennal has a strong connection to Owain Glyndwr. In the cemetery opposite the pub you will find a statue of him paid for by Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin because he’s as obsessed with Owain as I am.”
After he finishes the Playing Burton tour Rhys will go back to America to shoot a new series of Apple TV’s legal drama Presumed Innocent. Even in New York, however, he is doing his bit for the culture of his homeland. He and Russell have a nine-year-old son to whom he talks in Welsh.
But will the boy also follow in the footsteps of his father and mother and become a professional actor? “Not for all the tea in China,” Rhys replies emphatically. “I’ve already told him that if he has an urge to act he should get it out of his system now because it’s definitely not what he will be doing for a living.”
Playing Burton will be on at the Welsh National Theatre from November 16 to 28
Richard Morrison is the chief culture writer at The Times of London
