The director reveals why he finally came round to doing a play based on the cult film that made his name

By Robert Gore-Langton

Bruce Robinson is ramming a huge log into the grate of his ancient fireplace in mud-clogged Herefordshire. He’s 77 and the film for which he is famous, Withnail and I, is about to open as a play. Isn’t it curious it hasn’t happened before, given that the comedy is about two thirsty, unemployed actors and is a sort of love-hate letter to the theatre?

‘I was living on 30 bob a week – I could either afford fish and chips or ten gold leaf’

 

‘I wasn’t fond of the idea of staging it,’ says Robinson, who wrote and directed the 1987 film based on his own boozy life as an actor in the 1960s. ‘I’d done it, you know; it’s decades ago and it’s over. There was a time when Withnail was stuck to me like a colostomy bag. I just wanted to move on. But a while back, a lovely geezer called George Ward wanted to buy the stage rights. He is a very generous man and coughed up a good chunk of dough. So I’ve written the script but I am not the director. I’ve deliberately stayed away from rehearsals. I’d only bring a ball and chain as I would be looking to do what I did before.’

The show is being directed at the Birmingham Rep by Sean Foley, a seasoned comedy director who recently turned the Ealing classic The Man in the White Suit into a stage show. Two young actors play the leads. Robert Sheehan is Withnail, Adonis Siddique is ‘I’ (based on Robinson himself) with stage veteran Malcolm Sinclair playing Monty, Withnail’s fruity, lecherous, Old Harrovian uncle. It’s not a musical but there’s a live band to replicate the film’s soundtrack, which was notable for its doses of Jimi Hendrix. The film is set in 1969 and yet it remains oddly timeless. It made the names of Richard E. Grant (as Withnail) and Paul McGann (as ‘I’) as the two reprobates.

‘Withnail is very dialogue-driven so I didn’t find it difficult to write this stage version. I had to change certain things, though. I’ve put in a sword fight we had to cut from the film. My friend Viv [Vivian MacKerrell], who was part of the inspiration for Withnail, did a fencing class at drama school while having a Gauloise, the smoke pouring out of his mask. It really amused me then. But we couldn’t use it. So I’ve put the scene into the play and cut the scene with the bull.’

Robinson started acting as a child – and loved it. ‘I went to the secondary modern in Broadstairs – the Charles Dickens School. I remember a bust of Dickens with a big lump of chewing gum up his snout. I was in the school play – [Bluntschli] in Arms and the Man and Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations. I’ve been a mad Dickens fanatic ever since.’ Dickens regarded Shakespeare as ‘an unspeakable source of delight’. ‘I adore him too, but if I go to the theatre and the actors are acting Shakespeare and not the character, I just can’t stand it and I’m out of there.’

Robinson got a place at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. In his year was the late MacKerrell, a dissolute Old Harrovian who never bought a round and was nicknamed ‘Crime’ (because Crime doesn’t pay), with whom he shared a house of freezing squalor. Other students who became great mates were Lord David Dundas (also Harrow) who wrote brilliant music for the film; Michael Elphick, now dead, who played a gnarly rural character in the picture; and actor Michael Feast, who went with Robinson on the holiday that inspired the trip in the movie. ‘Without those people in that year Withnail wouldn’t have been done,’ he says. ‘I was blessed with great actors. We rehearsed it like a play.’

‘At that period in my life there weren’t any women. I couldn’t afford one’

He was lucky to be taught at Central by Eric Thompson, creator and narrator of The Magic Roundabout, father of actors Emma and Sophie Thompson. ‘Eric was a smashing director. He got me a job on Journey’s End [with the Manchester-based 69 Theatre Company] that had a long run in the West End.’

Robinson did many happy weeks in this classic first world war play and he produces a thick album of cuttings and plonks them on the kitchen table, including a notice in the Times which commended his ‘oily’ portrayal of a repulsive, cowardly officer and his ‘adolescent mous ’tache’. ‘There’s me,’ he points to the photo proudly, ‘and there’s my horrible little tache.’ Journey’s End is discreetly referred to in the Withnail film: Marwood – the ‘I’ character – finally goes for an audition and gets the lead part, sundering the two actors’ friendship.

As a jobbing actor Robinson was in various films, working with Francois Truffaut on The Story of Adèle H. He appeared in Ken Russell’s The Music Lovers ‘playing Tchaikovsky’s amanuensis – i.e., his bum boy’. But his most searing experience was as Benvolio (‘a rubbish part’) in Zeffirelli’s famous 1968 film of Romeo and Juliet. As soon as he got to Rome, the director pounced. ‘I was a pretty little bastard back then and it [the harassment] was ceaseless and serious. I don’t want to dig up a dead body and slap it about but he was unbelievably cruel. I’d say on the periphery of evil.’ Why didn’t he kick the Italian goat where it hurts? He needed the work.

‘I was living on thirty bob a week – I could afford either fish and chips or ten Gold Leaf. I was 20 years old, straight out of drama school and suddenly I was on 50 quid a week in this film. My stepfather, who was to the right of Lee Anderson because of the war, had brought me up believing the most disgusting place on Earth was Italy. So I get on the plane to disgusting Rome and was of course open-mouthed at its beauty. After the experience, I had a nervous breakdown in a hospital in Ramsgate. It was an awful time. It ruined my desire to be an actor.’

Revenge was his only option. Zeffirelli asked him ‘are you a sponge or a stone?’, a line assigned to the predatory Uncle Monty in the film, played to perfection by the late Richard Griffiths – though Robinson made Monty a more sympathetic figure than Zeffirelli seems to have been.

Robinson’s worst stage job was in Edward Bond’s 1968 avant-garde play Early Morning. It starred Marianne Faithfull as Florence Nightingale, who has a lesbian affair with Queen Victoria. It was the last play to be banned by the Lord Chamberlain, ending 231 years of state censorship. Robinson can remember nothing much about it except that the director, William Gaskill, hated him. It was mutual. At one point he was asked to read the part played by the young Dennis Waterman when he was off. ‘I was giving it the full Cockney and this director shouted [he shrieks camply]: “Just read the text. Don’t try and act it! Bruce Robinson, you haven’t earned the right to be on these boards.”’

Writing was his escape from an acting career that was going nowhere. ‘I had a totally shagged out old typewriter. I had no job, no money, no electric. I was going down to the local Odeon to nick light bulbs and lavatory rolls. I remember lying flat down on the floor and I just wanted to cry. I ended up laughing hysterically at the absurdity of being totally finished and stuffed at that young age. So I got up and started writing Withnail.’

Withnail is full of poetical thespishness but also poignancy – a comedy curdled with failure. Uncle Monty has lines that are cherished by its devoted fans: e.g. ‘It is the most devastating moment in a young man’s life, when he quite reasonably says to himself: “I shall never play the Dane!”’ Withnail does finally get to play Hamlet – albeit only in one speech, ‘what a piece of work is a man’, delivered in the rain to two sodden wolves in London Zoo.

If it’s true to its origins, the stage version of Withnail won’t tick many PC boxes. The depiction of Monty will probably be accused of being homophobic. And there are few women in it. Robinson is aware of the shortfall: ‘I’ll tell you exactly why there are no women in it. If you’re in a state of extreme poverty when you’re young, you can’t afford girlfriends. I wanted to use that, in a subliminal way, as a facet of their deprivation. For those boys in the film there is no femininity in their lives at all. And indeed at that period of my life, there weren’t any women. I couldn’t afford one.’

Robinson has a terrific flare for off-piste invective – against Thames Water, pollution in the River Wye, the weather, the government, you name it. ‘I am very political – but not in the party sense. I’m currently writing short stories taking the piss out of these arseholes as violently as I can. I do that to make myself laugh with loathing,’ he beams. What does he think will happen with the stage show, which, with its legion of devotees, must surely have West End potential? ‘It’ll either be a complete disaster or a huge success. I couldn’t say which.’

Source: ‘I couldn’t afford loo roll’: Bruce Robinson on being skint, Zeffirelli’s advances and Withnail’s return | The Spectator