Burton And Taylor: pills, booze and divadom Jul 20th 2013, 05:00
BBC4's latest drama is a wholly wonderful biopic that charts passion, scandal, superstardom and a trail of devastated soft furnishings
Broadway, 1983. A press conference fizzing with perms and speculation. "So, Liz," shouts a reporter above the hubbub. "Does this mean marriage number three for you and Richard?" Elizabeth Taylor (Helena Bonham Carter) smiles sweetly in her cerise power suit and leans towards the microphone. A hush descends. Shoulder pads stiffen in anticipation. "I can assure you," she pouts, cerisely, "that Richard and I have entered into this venture for purely … (a measured pause, a 98-carat wink) … creative reasons." Amid honks of glee, another hand shoots up. "So you have absolutely no plans to get back together again?" "None," grumps Richard Burton (Dominic West), Richard Burtonishly. "People can think what they like. But this is a play. And we," he booms above the chuckles, "are actors."
Well, of course they were. Richard Burton and Liz Taylor were actors much in the way that WWII was a "bit of a scuffle". The other stuff – the passion, the scandal, the superstardom, the booze, the trail of devastated soft furnishings – is charted in the wholly wonderful Burton And Taylor (Monday, 9pm, BBC4). Apparently the last of the channel's big dramas, it focuses on the pair's involvement in a critically bludgeoned production of Noël Coward's Private Lives – AKA "this bloody circus" (© R Burton) – a divorce-based farce that would echo the fiftysomethings' infamous off-stage histrionics while putting a final full stop on their 20-year on-off-on-off-on-off romance.
Other relationships skitter across Burton and Taylor's narrative horizon: the faintest outline of a doting daughter here, the briefest smudge of a supportive young wife there. But the 90-minute drama only has eyes for its headliners. It's just Burton, Taylor and us, our faces pressed against their fish bowl as they play out years of unresolved resentment and adoration against a backdrop of flashing cameras and cackling rubberneckers in ruffle-front viscose blouses.
So, yes. Burton And Taylor is another BBC4 biopic: that blend of voyeurism, nostalgia and interpretive biographical brass-rubbing that traditionally ends up chin down in a puddle of prurience. But this is so much more: a poignant, complicated portrait of an ageing ex-couple in freefall, the heritage fossicking resulting not in melodrama but wistfulness and compassion.
So here we are in New York, trundling around after Hollywood's former golden couple as they reunite professionally amid much harrumphing and sideways glances over afternoon martinis. While Taylor retreats rapidly into pills and diva-dom ("This is my parrot, Alvin"), Burton lumbers around like a colliery in a car coat. First he's on the wagon ("Just a Tab, please!"). Then he's off it. Then he's back on it. Then he's not just off the wagon but being run over by it, again and again; mumbling something about King Lear as his vast Welsh skull thwunks repeatedly against the tarmac. "My bloody arms hurt," he roars, pitifully, before nodding off in his bum-coloured polo neck. His heart's not in Private Lives. His heart's not in anything, really. Only Liz seems able to rouse him from his glummery; fragile, hilarious Liz, equal parts volcanic flirt and needy schoolgirl, whose adorably infuriating behaviour elicits from Burton as much fatherly concern as it does passion ("You alright, love? Have you eaten?")
"That's what bound us – trust?" wonders Taylor woozily over another reminiscence-laden dinner. "I always thought it was my tits."
It's all speculation, of course. Nobody is suggesting that Taylor really spent hours pontificating boozily on the significance of her jugs, or that Burton roared lines from King Lear to himself in a repellent polo neck. But so sweet, funny and human is William Ivory's script, and so believable are Bonham Carter and West, that it's nigh on impossible not to fall in love with these impossible sods as they bellow, whinge, guffaw and rage against the dying of the light. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, then. They were actors, you know.
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