As the audience sits briefly in the dark at the beginning of the work?s first act, the theater?s sound system plays the BBC Radio reports of the celebrated Welsh actor?s passing, in a hospital in Geneva, Switzerland, on Aug. 5, 1984, when Mallon, as Burton, barges onstage and interrupts the broadcast in order to tell the story his own way.
After the intermission, the lights come up to find the stage ?Burton? seated in a chair alongside a pile of newspapers filled with articles about the end of the most famous life ever to have begun in Pontrhydyfen, South Wales.
He goes through the reports as though they were so many reviews following the opening of a play, some of them satisfactory, others not.
Actor Mallon, who bears an almost startling resemblance to the late star, isn?t the first player to perform Jenkins?s script, which, according to the programme notes, ?has had over six hundred performances, in two productions on three continents,? but he may well be the best, if for no other specific reason than the help he?s given, start to finish, by his physical closeness to Burton.
Considering that ?Playing Burton? has been around for nearly a decade, having given its first performance at the Edinburgh Festival in August, 1994, it?s surprising that Mallon hasn?t performed the script until now, since he?s so astonishingly right for the role.
Mallon?s ?rightness? doesn?t by any means stop with his physical appearance, since, under the playwright?s direction, he?s done a masterly job of recreating the Welshman?s singular vocal breathiness and distinctive, slightly artificial, speech patterns.
The current theatrical season may be remembered for the number of productions picking the bones of dead and dying celebrities in the worlds of music, movies and theater. There was ?Love, Janis,? about Janis Joplin, the pride of Port Arthur, Texas, and ?Lost Highway,? which told the story of the sad, brief life of country singer Hank Williams.
?Tea at Five,? in which Kate Mulgrew impersonated Katharine Hepburn at two key moments in her life, opened while the ailing star was still alive. Hepburn?s death, which occurred after the production had announced its closing date, caused every subsequent performance to sell out.
Now, in addition to Mallon?s Burton at the Irish Rep, there is Mary Birdsong playing Judy Garland in a one-woman show, ?Judy Speaks!? at the Ars Nova Theatre, a small, relatively new performance space at 511 West 54th St.
The impact of these shows, it goes without saying, is in direct proportion to the interest the audience has invested in the performer being portrayed, and, in a way, to the length of time the impersonated individual has been in the public eye.
The downside of this familiarity is that most of these productions tend to be regurgitations of information, stories, anecdotes opinions and so forth, to which the audience has already been exposed, sometimes ad nauseam.
This was particularly true of ?Tea at Five,? since the life of Hepburn, despite the star?s vaunted reclusiveness, approached being something of an open book.
Richard Burton, well known as he was as a ranking stage star, wasn?t really a world-famous name until, during the production of ?Cleopatra? in Rome in 1964, he romanced and later married Elizabeth Taylor.
Jenkins?s script touches on Burton?s ambivalence where celebrity bordering on notoriety was concerned. When his Italian affair with actress Taylor hit the tabloids, Laurence Olivier, who considered himself, with some justification, the watchdog of the British acting profession, fired off a cable to Burton asking, ?Do you want to be an actor or a household name??
The Welshman wired back a simple, one-word message, reading, ?Both.?
?Playing Burton? is full of the sort of anecdotes that have been the stuff of theater bar small talk at least since the actor starred on Broadway in the Lerner and Loewe musical ?Camelot.? There are tales galore of his drinking bouts, often in the company of acting colleagues such as Peter O?Toole and Robert Hardy.
What is new, and somewhat incredible, is that his drinking apparently caused Burton to undergo a back operation to ?scrape crystallized alcohol? from his spinal column.
Other unfamiliar Burton details include such trivial items as his color-blindness and the fact that Elizabeth Taylor feared that her upper arms were becoming fat. Vastly less trivial is the information that the actor and his first wife, Sybil Williams, had, in addition to actress Kate Burton, another daughter, Jessica, who appears to have been developmentally disabled, and who, as Mallon?s Burton puts it, ?will very likely never speak.?
A vein of sorrow runs through ?Playing Burton,? as the text describes the actor, whose birth name was Richard Jenkins, grieving over the fate of his brother, Ivor, who, 19 years older than the star, played an important part in raising him, as did his sister, known simply as ?Sis.?
Ivor Jenkins, at age 61, was paralyzed in a fall in the snow at his brother?s home in Switzerland and died two years later, a sad event for which Burton seems to have blamed himself, since he was absent at the time and his older brother was injured doing chores more or less assigned him by his younger sibling.
Richard Jenkins became Richard Burton when he was adopted by schoolmaster Philip Burton, who saw towering potential in the undereducated, underprivileged Welsh boy whose formal schooling had stopped at age 14.
There are flaws and awkwardnesses in ?Playing Burton.? Do Jenkins and Mallon really expect audiences to believe that producer Darryl F. Zanuck spoke in the tones of a Brooklyn thug and thought that the term ?Old Vic? referred to somebody?s uncle.
Despite such gaffes, plus a certain rambling quality in the writing, ?Playing Burton? is an earnest, absorbing project, perfectly suited to the Irish Rep?s W. Scott McLucas Studio.
Whatever our feelings about Richard Burton, his life and his work may be, Mallon?s modest, intimate show is well worth seeing.