In 1988, I worked on a listings magazine’s competition page. One week, the prize was tickets to a new film called Withnail and I. There were also soundtrack albums and posters designed by Ralph Steadman. The entries did not come flooding in. Watching Bruce Robinson’s movie for myself I thought it was nothing to get excited about. Certainly, I had no inkling there would ever be a stage adaptation with “West End transfer” written all over it.
But then I wasn’t considering the power of the VHS tape. At some point after its general release, Withnail and I became a staple of drunken student nights in. With its eminently quotable lines and air of stoned dilapidation – a kind of 60s answer to The Young Ones – it snowballed into a cult hit, making a star of Richard E Grant and propelling Paul McGann on the road to Doctor Who.
It means sections of the audience in the Birmingham Rep treat Sean Foley’s slick and energetic production like a tribute act, less a piece of theatre than a collection of favourite one-liners and iconic images. Robert Sheehan as Withnail earns shrieks of approval just for saying, “We want the finest wines available to humanity.” Robinson’s script, which he has adapted himself, has a pleasing aphoristic quality but it is not exactly Oscar Wilde.
It is the same when Sheehan enters wearing that voluminous great coat and when he and Adonis Siddique as Marwood – the “I” of the title – take to the road in a real-life Jaguar Mk2. No fault of the show, but it is as if it exists to enable fans of the film to relive a shared moment.
Yet if copycat adaptations are your thing, Withnail and I is as good a candidate as any. Telling the story of two aspiring actors and their accidental holiday in Penrith, the film has a small number of characters, each distinctly drawn, and a similarly small number of scenes, all of which are carried by the strength of the acting. That makes for a smooth transition to the stage. Much of Robinson’s script is word-for-word the same and, if anything, Marwood’s movie voiceovers sit more comfortably as direct audience address.
Foley gives it a boost with grungy live renditions of Jimi Hendrix, the Kinks and Procol Harum numbers and a sprinkling of visual gags, such as the bunch of carrots that dangle friskily in front of the groin of the predatory Uncle Monty (Malcolm Sinclair). Sheehan makes a loose-limbed Withnail, lost in a haze of boozy entitlement, while Siddique is amusingly timid as Marwood, the grammar-school boy out of his depth.
The backstage crew do a tremendous job facilitating the magical transformations of Alice Power’s set, which is given extra depth by Akhila Krishnan’s large-scale video. It adds up to a bright, crowd-pleasing show, playing to fans of the original without tinkering with the formula that made it such a sleeper hit.
At Birmingham Rep until 25 May
