Withnail and I, Birmingham Rep review — stage adaptation lurches with a drunken stagger

“There must be some kind of way outta here,” sings Sooz Kempner early in Sean Foley’s adaptation of the 1987 cult film Withnail and I. It’s a lament we soon share as this production serves up an ersatz version of the film without imagination of its own.

Withnail and Marwood, incarnated on screen by Richard E Grant and Paul McGann, are jobbing actors: Marwood earning auditions, Withnail consoling himself with alcohol when he fails to do the same. They take a holiday from their cesspit Camden flat; here grime and grunge are steeped in the mouldering walls of Alice Power’s set.

The film’s plot beats are dutifully rehashed, including Withnail swigging lighter fluid for an ethanol hit. But the rhythm and plotting have their own drunken stagger, bouncing between settings and episodes: a pint in the pub or being thrown out of a café. The atmosphere is equally limp, while long scene changes exacerbate the sense of disjointed sketches. Needle-drops of Sixties music blare over the top of these transitions that feel incongruent with the trivial action and seem to exist more to try to electric-shock it into life.

That jolt of interest comes from Malcolm Sinclair’s Uncle Monty. With a plummy drawl orbiting Jacob Rees-Mogg, he swills words around his mouth like the wine he adores, pumping his plosives like popping corks. Although he elevates comedy that’s reliant on innuendos such as “Do you want a sausage?”, the plotline of the callow young man trying to evade the predatory homosexual is drawn out and feels retrograde, with Marwood’s horrified cries of “I nearly got a buggering!”

As Withnail, Robert Sheehan physically suggests a man who is more liquid than solid, his body sloshing around the stage like the bottles of booze often in his hand. But he’s also tiring company with his histrionics and motormouth grousing. Sheehan holds hysterical pitch throughout, even in dud lines such as: “Don’t threaten me with a dead fish.”

There’s no depth to the character until the very last moment when, unceremoniously ditched by Marwood, he slowly cracks, his wide smirks melting into a tremble as he howls Hamlet’s “What a piece of work is a man” soliloquy into the rain. It’s a powerfully stark, moving flash of the tragicomedy and pathos that were needed long before. Adonis Siddique as Marwood doesn’t convey the character’s dawning realisation that the cost of his companionship is that his life is heading into the same hopeless oblivion.

Nor is there any commentary on that joblessness or the sociopolitical context. Druggie Danny prophesies how the hedonism of the Swinging Sixties would crash into the stagflation of the Seventies: “London is a country coming down from its trip . . . and there’s gonna be a lot of refugees.” But it feels a late, pat moment for the show’s otherwise facile register.

This is adaptation as imitation, so blindly devoted to the source that it retains its own mildew and musty air. By the end, that lighter fluid no longer seems so unappealing.

★★☆☆☆

To May 25, birmingham-rep.co.uk