The VIP

Roy Smiles

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2018
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786825247
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Arte dramático británico

In The VIP Welsh film and theatre icon Richard Burton is trapped at a fog-bound Heathrow Airport in 1968 shortly after finishing filming Where Eagles Dare. He is haunted by visions of his wives Sybil and Elizabeth Taylor; his drinking companions Dylan Thomas and Peter O'Toole and his miner father. Has Burton sacrificed his considerable talent for the tarnished glory of fame, fortune and love?    

Act One

Music: the theme tune to the film ‘Where Eagles Dare’.

The lights rise on:

The VIP lounge at Heathrow Airport, sometime in 1968;

The Welsh film and theatre actor RICHARD BURTON, aged forty-two, sits alone;

He sits in an armchair, one of many, facing out.

All is loud tartan carpeting and modish 1960’s furnishings.

Behind him, filling the stage is a huge glass window overlooking the exterior of the airport; though nothing is seen of it as there is only darkness and thick, swirling fog; which creates an eerie and dislocating affect.

The music fades.

BURTON stares at the audience:

BURTON. (To AUDIENCE) Heathrow Airport: late evening, autumn, 1968; here I sit. All around me fog billows. A menacing shroud unleashed by a malignant God. Grounding even the rich and famous, grounding even me, the Welshman who has flown the world and his coop; who’d have thought mere fog could have grounded the Great Burton? Not I. He waits alone, in a VIP lounge and his own personal hell. For no other Very Important Persons fly on this day. No O’Toole’s to carouse with. No wife to snipe, snarl and bicker with; no lackeys, cronies or sycophants to hang on his every flamboyant, over-articulate word. I sit, as bilious cockneys would have it, all ‘on my Jack Jones’. Thus the Great Burton is forced into the company of the one he loathes: himself; far from home, so very far from home.

A BAC air hostess - JANINE STONE - enters, right.

A smartly uniformed Northeastern Englishwoman in her twenties, blonde and attractive; she crosses to him.

JANINE. I’m sorry Mr. Burton but the fog doesn’t seem to be lifting.

BURTON. English weather changes for no man, not even the Great Burton.

JANINE. I’m afraid your flight’s delayed again.

BURTON. Such is life.

JANINE. They’ll be making further announcements.

BURTON. The Victorians called this a ‘pea-souper’. The Hoxton Strangler used to run amok in weather like this. I feel the urge to join him.

JANINE. Can I just say I’m a huge fan?

BURTON. Of course you can.

JANINE. Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Wolf was such a great movie.

BURTON. That wasn’t a film, luv; it was a documentary on my marriage.

JANINE. (Laughs) It can’t be that bad surely?

BURTON. You’d be surprised. I’m George, without the cardigan.

JANINE. Miss Taylor can’t be Martha.

BURTON. Can’t she?

JANINE. She’s too glamorous.

BURTON. Again: you’d be surprised.

JANINE. She’s not with you this trip?

BURTON. No, not this trip. Weary and weighed down by her diamonds she had to retire to bed, to fondle her baubles.

JANINE. That sounds - perverted.

BURTON. The last diamond I bought her was the size of a turnip. She uses it as a paperweight. Thus are the ostentatious humbled.

JANINE. (Laughs) Can I get you another drink?

BURTON. But of course.

JANINE. Bloody Mary?

BURTON. The bloodier the better.

JANINE. Won’t be a tick.

BURTON. Of course you won’t, luv.

JANINE exits, right.

BURTON. (To AUDIENCE) They all flirt with me of course, for I am famous and all that entails. I am married to the voluptuous beast that is ‘Liz’ Taylor. She of the Heaving Mammary Glands. Cleopatra. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The Queen of Sluts, at least according to the Vatican. I fly to her side now. Summoned like the gigolo I am, to service my celebrity spouse. I have been filming Where Eagles Dare. A boy’s own adventure, where Clint Eastwood kills 1,037 Germans without ever having to reload his gun; whilst I yell to the mountain tops for no apparent reason: (Shouts) ‘Broadsword calling Danny Boy! Broadsword calling Danny Boy!’ (Beat) A pile of turd but exuberant Alistair MacLean turd; once I played Hamlet, now I blow up Aust...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• The VIP
• Act One
• Act Two