Theatre: Burton Taylor Affair, Oran Mor, Glasgow, one star

WHY? Of all the topics in the world, of all the fascinating people – living or dead – and of all the famous couples who still attract column inches of nostalgic speculation, why write your first play about Liz Taylor and Richard Burton? Why take the risk of putting characters onstage who are – not least because of recent TV biopics – already so well known to the public that any surprising plot twists or startling new revelations are unlikely.

Perhaps writer Steven Elliot – himself an actor and director – has fixed on Taylor and Burton as totemic representatives of stage and screen? And will use them to explore the nuances of dramatic role-playing, the psychological highs and lows of having stardom thrust upon you, the destructive effects of too much adulation, money and booze on your private life, if you actually manage to sustain one. No such luck. What scrapes on-stage and stays there for some 40 minutes is scarcely more than a cut ’n’ paste collage of facts, fictions and gossip.

As Liz (Vivien Reid) and Richard (Dewi Rhys Williams) wander down memory lane – painstakingly telling us the life stuff that really they don’t want, or need, to be reminded of – it’s as if this most seismic of passionate affairs has had a charisma bypass. Reid, in a slink of black velvet, adopts a kind of kittenish, girly tone while Williams is more faded gent than a craggy Welsh boyo whose voice was burnished with poetic grandeur. Glasses are filled and emptied, perfunctory snogs exchanged, gobbets of Shakespeare put through a mincer – and actually misquoted – as the pair scramble up what is Elliot’s learning curve. No lifelines from director Chelsey Gillard either. The piece is produced in associated with the Sherman Theatre, Wales.