Richard Burton’s Manitoba days behind Winnipeg actor’s new play

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This article was published 12/09/2002 (8667 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

ACTOR Richard Burton’s days as an 18-year-old Royal Air Force cadet in Manitoba during the Second World War is the starting point of a new play by a Winnipeg actor.

Jon Ted Wynne wrote Liz & Dick during a 10-day Playwrights Colony last month, and is already generating interest by theatres in and outside the city.

“I have high hopes for this play,” says Wynne, a veteran of the stage who often pens scripts for the Winnipeg Fringe Festival. “Something is going to come of this play.”

The seed of Dick & Liz was planted a decade ago when Wynne read Free Press columnist Gordon Sinclair Jr.’s story about Dickie Burton’s ties to Winnipeg. The young poetry-spouting Welshman was stationed in Portage in 1945, and regularly went looking for action in Winnipeg on off-days. He was one of 364 RAF recruits who was welcomed into the St. James home of Sally Cannell and her husband Gus, at 123 Parkview St.

Aunt Sally, as she was known, made a big impression on the future star of stage and screen, especially after he was caught breaking curfew.

Burton was the only one of her “boys” who ever stayed out all night, and the next day was dressed down by a finger-waving Aunt Sally, who admonished him for such reckless behaviour.

“She told him, ‘Don’t play to the gutter, you’ll be a great actor some day,'” says Wynne, who has written the fringe shows Pawn of Darkness and Really Scary Tales.

Long after he left Manitoba, Burton continued to correspond with Aunt Sally. She was even his guest for the Broadway premiere of Camelot.

Wynne clipped Sinclair’s column from the paper, and was discussing it with a friend a few years ago who just so happened to know the Cannell family and arranged a meeting. That research formed the basis for Dick & Liz, a play which dramatizes the melancholy, self-destructive Burton’s search for an identity.

Cannell’s “don’t play to the gutter” reprimand would prove to be the first of many warnings Burton would receive about compromising his talent. Joseph Mankiewicz, who directed him and Elizabeth Taylor in the 1963 film flop Cleopatra, once said Burton didn’t know who he was.

“I researched it for two years and wrote it in 10 days,” says Wynne. “It really poured out. The day before I finished it, I had a reading at the Manitoba Theatre Centre.”

So who does he imagine would be the ideal actor to play Burton?

“Me,” he says. “I’m serious. I’m Welsh and can do his voice. I read some of his letters to the Cannells and they closed their eyes and wept because of how much I sounded like him.”

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Playwright Bruce McManus (Selkirk Avenue, Calenture) is also busy banging away on various commissions. He’s writing the second draft of an adaptation of the Dickens classic A Christmas Carol for MTC (for maybe 2003) as well as dramatizing Chekhov’s The Three Sisters for Prairie Theatre Exchange. Then it’s on to a new play, which has been commissioned by the Warehouse.

“Once I get through this I bet you I will be the first playwright in Winnipeg to have adapted Dickens, Chekhov and Ibsen,” says McManus, who re-set A Doll’s House for PTE in 1998. “I want a PhD in playwriting for doing them. I learned a lot from those guys. The minds of writers are like hard-drives; once information is loaded in there, it stays there forever.”

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Musical-maker Danny Schur is researching Winnipeg’s famous 1919 general strike and is appealing to the public for information about the only man shot and killed at the riot in front of city hall.

Schur is eager to chat up anyone who might have information about Mike Sokolowski, who was killed instantly by a police bullet through the heart on June 21, 1919. No one showed up to his funeral even after the Free Press immortalized him by printing his picture three days later.

“Mike’s life and death are one of the enduring mysteries of the 1919 strike,” says Schur, whose new work is called Strike! Musical. “I’m trying to resolve how this fellow came to die at this place. Was he an innocent bystander or an ultra-communist agitator?”

Sokolowski, who lived at 608 Magnus Ave., is buried at Brookside Cemetery. Schur, who has penned the musicals The Bridge and The Tree, is looking for perhaps a long-time neighbour with information that might shed some light on Sokolowski.

“My hope is that somebody’s grandfather was Mike’s brother, or that perhaps, if he had children, they eventually made it to Canada,” Schur says. “I know it is a longshot but I’m trying to be thorough.”

Schur can contacted by calling 589-7769.

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The Gilbert & Sullivan Society of Winnipeg will hold auditions for its spring production of H.M.S. Pinafore Sept. 28 and 29. Interested performers are asked to call 943-6400 or 477-0865.