Henwood Inc

By LINDA HERRICK

Richard Burton is coming to town. I know, I've spoken to him. That seductive, whisky-garnished Welsh voice purred poetry to me over the phone:

"What'll you have? the waiter said, as he stood there picking his nose.

"I'll take two hardboiled eggs, you son of a bitch, because you can't stick your fingers in those!"

Followed by that Burtonesque 'heh-heh-heh ... '

It's uncanny. Of course I know the Welsh actor died in 1984 after a lifetime of boozing, talent-frittering and Elizabeth Taylor ... But that voice gliding from the mouth of one of our best-known actors, Ray Henwood, is so Burton as he recites lines from playwright Mark Jenkins' one-man opus Playing Burton.

Henwood, also a Welshman, has been getting under Burton's slightly pockmarked skin for more than a year, touring Playing Burton up and down New Zealand. He brings him to Auckland this month before heading to Australia and a season at the Sydney Opera House in November.

Logistically, it's an easy production to tour. It has few props - a chair, a table, some cigarettes and an enormous bottle of "vodka". As the dialogue arcs from Burton's childhood in the mining village of Pontrhydfen, South Wales, to his early brilliance as an actor, to the disastrous marriages, career and failing health, the words are washed down with an increasing intake of booze.

"He gives lovely anecdotes as a young man. You follow the strength of the young man coming into his blossoming," says Henwood. "Then in the second half, it's all done with a drink. He consumes the whole bottle. You can feel the weariness of that man. Why is he drinking so much? In my view, he's bored to death."

Henwood, who emigrated to New Zealand in 1962, says you don't have to be Welsh to play Burton, but it helps. "I know the family Burton came from. I understand the way they lived, the miners in the valleys."

He already knew quite a bit about Burton's life - and who didn't at the time? He and Taylor were the gods of the tabloids. But he researched further by reading and watching some of the films, "the good and the bad".

"I got out a whole range of videos: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Equus, Where Eagles Dare. In my view he was not as good a film actor as he was a stage actor. I think he knew that."

In the play, Burton recalls the first time he saw Taylor, at a Bel Air party. "A girl sitting on the other side of the pool ... looks at me with such coolness a new ice cube forms in my scotch and soda. She is so extraordinarily beautiful I nearly laugh out loud."

He was hooked. Cleopatra entwined them and Burton's talent was spent on other things, like houses, jewellery, fur coats, minders, divorces - and lots of alcohol.

To pay for all of that, Burton started making movies like Bluebeard, Raid on Rommel, Divorce His - Divorce Hers, Exorcist II, all pitiful stuff, but Henwood doesn't regard him as a failure.

"His life and career certainly included a lot of self-destruction, but the clue was he was bored. The lines from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold say it all. He was just as John le Carre describes [his voice sharpens into a cold, Burton snarl] a man bent on self-destruction, gripped by almost cosmic boredom."

Towards the end of his life, Burton had dried out and had some positive things to work towards, says Henwood. "He was extremely intelligent and well read and he'd been offered a sabbatical fellowship at Oxford at which he would teach.

"And the Old Vic had asked him to do a season there in Lear. He could have done things that would have been his redemption. The English would have accepted him back as the classical actor he once was. But he died."

Even though Henwood first became well known to New Zealand audiences through ensemble work in the hugely popular TV series Gliding On and Market Forces, he is a master of the solo stage.

His show about Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, Nogood Boyo, which he wrote, was a hit here and in Australia in the early-80s, and he got the Burton role through his work in another solo play.

"I was in Rutherford in the 2000 International Festival in Wellington, and the British director Guy Masterson, who has done quite a bit of work in this country, said, 'Hey look, you must play Burton. See if you can get the rights and I'll come out to New Zealand and do it with you'."

Henwood found that being with Dylan Thomas so intensely for Nogood Boyo meant his "admiration of the man as a talent turned into a feeling this man would have been impossible to live with".

And it's the same with Burton. "He would have been a joy to be with at times, he was a great raconteur - and it would have been a great joy to walk away from him sometimes."

* Playing Burton, Herald Theatre, Aotea Centre, May 21-June 7.