Mr Burton review – the teacher who inspired and encouraged screen legend Richard Burton

The Guardian

02-04-2025

The career of Richard Burton seemed mythic at the time, and more so in retrospect. In Pedro Almodóvar's latest movie The Room Next Door, Julianne Moore's character is even shown reading Erotic Vagrancy, Roger Lewis's account of Burton's then-adulterous relationship with Elizabeth Taylor in the early 60s, the title taken from Pope John XXIII's extraordinary denunciation: 'You will finish in an erotic vagrancy, without end or without a safe port.' In fact, the nearest thing Burton ever had to a safe port was his inspirational English teacher Philip Burton in Port Talbot, south Wales, whose own frustrated dreams of the theatre were poured into the bright young miner's son Richard Jenkins, coaching him in acting and even making him his legal ward and getting him to change his surname to Burton to facilitate the teacher's sponsorship of his Oxford scholarship.
It's the subject of this heartfelt, vigorously acted, enjoyable, if slightly naive movie from screenwriters Tom Bullough and Josh Hyams, and director Marc Evans. Toby Jones stars as the spaniel-eyed Mr Burton and Harry Lawtey is Richard, a lanky, needy kid morphing into that insufferably haughty and sonorous prince of the English stage. It tells a uniquely painful and dysfunctional story, and does its best to show how Burton's pride always coexisted with shame and self-hate, and culminated with him playing Hal in Henry IV Part 2 at Stratford with Mr Burton in the audience, the pair effectively enacting their own version of the Hal/Falstaff betrayal scene.
The film also takes up the disputed claim that Richard's boozy and negligent dad only relinquished legal guardianship to Mr Burton in return for the teacher's cash payment of £50, the equivalent of £1,300 today. That may or may not be true, but it is certainly consistent with something deeply uncomfortable in the whole affair – this is no simple feelgood story. Even Billy Elliot's dad didn't actually give up his parental rights.
Lawtey makes for a livewire Richard, living with his sister Cis (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) and her glowering husband Elfed (Aneurin Barnard) because there's no room with his drunk dad Dic Jenkins (Steffan Rhodri) down the road. When he does well in Mr Burton's English class and at his drama club, he moves in to Mr Burton's house, where the film imagines a landlady called Ma Smith (Lesley Manville), perhaps to provide a chaperoning presence in the story. The drama here is absolutely clear that there was nothing predatory in the older man's intentions, despite an ugly homophobic jibe from Dic Jenkins once he'd got that fabled £50 in his hand. But certainly Richard himself is resentful and confused and there is an excruciatingly embarrassing encounter between the two in Mr Burton's bedroom with both in their pyjamas.
Does the film bowdlerise the teacher's complicated, hidden emotional life? Perhaps, yes. There is no evidence of abuse, but no one is under any illusions about what others were insinuating. Jones certainly shows Mr Burton's sad and dignified loneliness.
Mr Burton is in UK and Irish cinemas from 4 April.