Planning to go away this Christmas? It is worth revisiting this top-shelf comedy about two boozy would-be actors who go on holiday by mistake
By Dee Jefferson
If you like what Richard E Grant is doing now – in series such as The Franchise and films like Can You Ever Forgive Me? and Saltburn – you really should see where it all began: the 1987 flop turned cult classic Withnail and I. Grant delivers a tour de force comedic performance as an alcoholic out-of-work actor living with his best mate in a squalid London flat at the tail end of 1969 who goes on a rural holiday by mistake.
It’s funnier than it sounds. In fact, Withnail and I is top-shelf comedy, with some of the finest lines and line readings available to humanity. (A personal favourite: “This place has become impossible. Perpetual rain, freezing cold and now a madman on the prowl outside with eels.”)
t didn’t play this way at the beginning: like many cult classics, Withnail and I bombed at the box office and was generally poorly reviewed, accreting fandom gradually – in this case, assisted by the spread of VCR technology. In particular, it passed like a secret handshake through students – who recognised simpatico spirits and familiar dilemmas – which I assume is how I discovered it, in the early 2000s.
was familiar with the title and cover – it was a fixture of video stores in the 90s – but I’d somehow assumed it was too rarefied for my unrefined palate; only to discover, in my chaotic uni years, that it was a kind of spiritual homecoming. In my soul, I’m probably eternally pottering around the muddy countryside of Withnail and I, seeking beauty (and potatoes) while beset by madmen brandishing eels.
Circa 2000, Withnail and I was probably my first encounter with Grant, but with hindsight I realise it cemented the qualities that have defined his best roles in the decades since: sharp-tongued patrician hauteur interspersed with manic energy and childlike glee. It’s also a masterclass in playing drunk – all the more miraculous for the fact that he is a lifelong teetotaller.
Grant plays Withnail (pronounced “WITH-null” in the film, though curiously you only ever hear fans – even British people – pronounce the film’s title “WITH-NAIL”), an upper-crust scion with a world-class talent for drink and drugs, and a more dubious talent for acting; in his own estimation, “a trained actor reduced to the status of a bum”, thanks to his inability to secure an audition.
The titular “I” (played by Paul McGann) is Marwood: middle class, biblically beautiful, and also an actor, though mildly more successful – not only has he secured an audition, he’s about to get a callback. Like Withnail, Marwood is a prodigious drinker, but he’s less of a connoisseur of psychotropics than his friend; more a dilettante. The film opens on him in the middle of a panic attack, surrounded by the souvenirs of a speed- and booze-fuelled 60-hour bender.
This is ostensibly Marwood’s story, but from the moment Grant enters the picture around five minutes in – sepulchral in his hangover, wrapped in tailored tweed and brandishing a wine bottle – it’s clear he’s going to steal the show. “I have some extremely distressing news,” he informs Marwood. “We’ve just run out of wine.”
Writer-director Bruce Robinson based the film on his semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, drawing on his years as a struggling actor living in Camden. This is not the stylish, swinging 60s London often depicted on film, but rather a down-and-out working-class melting pot at the fag end of a decade of dissolution. The hangover is a bastard.
Marwood and Withnail, adept at dodging reality, decamp to the countryside: a holiday cottage in the Lake District owned by Withnail’s wealthy uncle Monty (the irrepressible Richard Griffiths), himself a failed thesp. Monty is also somewhat of a failed homosexual, and as we discover, Withnail has secured the keys to the cottage by offering up his unsuspecting friend as an amuse-bouche. When Monty arrives at the cottage looking to claim his prize, the wheels of the already rickety wagon fall well and truly off.
None of this plays out in the way you’d expect, which is really the strength of all the best films and certainly the best comedies. Writing from his own life – including his experiences of predatory older gay men in the clubs and casting couches of 60s London – Robinson is humanistic, even tender, and never glib. Monty is no monster. Even Withnail, a paragon of patrician entitlement, is more damaged child than diabolical fiend. And Marwood is no angel: we come to see that he has an exploitative instinct every bit as ruthless as his friend’s.
Withnail and I is foremost a comedy, but the film’s enduring emotional power lies in its devastating portrayal of a friendship that has tipped from intoxicating high into melancholic low. Marwood, as ambitious as his friend but more pragmatic, moves on – leaving us with the ambivalent sense that this is both necessary and a betrayal. But as with all trips, don’t let the inevitable comedown put you off going on the sublime and often ridiculous journey.
Discover why Bruce Robinson’s Withnail and I is a must-read for screenwriters looking to study timeless dialogue and unforgettable characters.
By Martin Keady
In a new series for Script Lab, Martin Keady, our resident cinema historian, examines The Greatest Screenplays: scripts that every screenwriter should read and learn from. He begins with Withnail and I, Bruce Robinson’s semi-autobiographical classic about a pair of unemployed actors trying to get their wits together in the countryside at the end of the 1960s.
You know a screenplay is great when you have read it over a hundred times, and it still yields new insights and delights. And lest anyone accuse me of hyperbole, that is at least the number of times that I read the screenplay for Withnail and I while researching and writing my contributions to Withnail and I: From Cult To Classic, the book about the film produced by the author and designer Toby Benjamin.
Few screenplays, if any, reward such voluminous rereading, but Withnail and I certainly does. Indeed, to paraphrase just one of its many magnificent pieces of dialogue, it contains “the finest lines available to humanity.”
Even if I were to put aside my contributions to the book, I have still written far more about Withnail and I than I have any other screenplay in more than a decade of writing for The Script Lab. Indeed, it was my numerous pieces for The Script Lab about the film that first alerted Toby Benjamin to my love for it, including my declaration in a piece written nearly 10 years ago (The Forty Greatest Screenplays Ever Written) that it was the only screenplay that could match Casablanca (1942) for sheer quotability, such that virtually every line, no matter how seemingly trivial, could be quoted and indeed was constantly quoted.
However, while Casablanca is almost universally hailed as one of the greatest screenplays ever written, if not the greatest screenplay, Withnail and I is, by comparison, relatively little known, especially in America. Consequently, I hope that this article goes some small way towards raising its profile in America and alerting US screenwriters to the existence of the greatest screenplay they have probably never read.
Withnail and I: The Backstory
Perhaps the first thing to say about the screenplay for Withnail and I is that it is just one element (albeit probably the most important element) of a perfect film. By “perfect,” I mean a film in which every single element, from the opening credits to the closing score (and encompassing everything in between), is of a uniformly outstanding quality. There is no miscast minor actor or awful backdrop-to-a-moving-car à la so many Alfred Hitchcock movies to make it lose its spell over a viewer for even a single moment.
In Withnail and I, the directing, acting, cinematography, editing, music, and everything else (set design, costume, hair, etc.) that makes up the movie is absolutely superb, such that it can be legitimately described as being perfect or as perfect as any human creation can ever be.
That is especially true of the screenplay, which in Britain has made it as legendary as any screenplay ever written. Indeed, the “backstory” to Withnail and I is itself worthy of being filmed, as it took its Robinson over a decade to complete, culminating in George Harrison reading it on a transatlantic flight and agreeing to produce it (for HandMade Films, the production company he had founded in 1978) as soon as the plane had landed.
What Makes a Great Screenplay?
As with any screenplay, the two most important elements of Withnail and I are its plotting and dialogue, both of which are exceptional, albeit for completely different reasons.
The Plot
The plot is simple, if not perfunctory. At the end of the 1960s (literally, as the action of the film takes place in the last few months of 1969), two out-of-work actors (the titular Withnail and I, who is named in the script as Marwood) emerge from their latest episode of Bacchanalian excess and decide that what they require is a break in the country, in keeping with the then-current trend among British bands, notably Traffic, to leave the city and record in more rural surroundings.
As I/Marwood puts it, with his usual mixture of plain talk and poetry: “What we need is harmony. Fresh air. Stuff like that.”
Being impoverished (even though Withnail comes from a wealthy family, albeit one he is largely estranged from), the pair resort to palling up to Withnail’s Uncle Monty, the one member of his extended family who he finds less than completely disagreeable, perhaps partly because Monty himself had “crept the boards in my youth” (i.e. acted). Monty duly lends them the key to his remote country cottage, which is more falling-down shack than a rural idyll, and the two set off from London for the Lake District, which is literally at the other end of England, for “a delightful weekend in the country.”
What ensues is anything but “delightful,” as Withnail and I/Marwood are set upon by amorous bulls, vengeful poachers, and ultimately Uncle Monty who, in the last days before homosexuality is fully legalized and generally accepted in Britain, has taken a shine to I/Marwood and consequently sets out to join him at the cottage.
This swift summation of the plot of Withnail and I was further summarised by one reviewer of the film as being, “Here. There. Here.” That line is a nod to a line in the script, namely the three-word note left by the poacher (when he is feeling less vengeful) alongside the rabbit he eventually decides to give Withnail and I: “Here, hare, here!”
In truth, there is little more to the supposed “storyline” of Withnail and I than this flitting between London and the Lake District, or between the city and the countryside. And yet Withnail and I is arguably the greatest example in cinema of the old dictum in literature that the greatest stories are those in which nothing happens but everything changes.
Nothing (or more accurately not much) actually happens in Withnail and I, yet everything changes for the titular pair, particularly I/Marwood, who gradually realizes that his supposed friend is actually utterly selfish and even prepared to risk his physical safety to get what he wants, most notably when he admits to I/Marwood that he had told Monty that I/Marwood was homosexual to gain access to his country retreat.
Ultimately, I/Marwood gains revenge by rejecting Withnail at the end of the film when he goes off to an acting job in Manchester, and Withnail is left to rot, alone, in the rat-infested flat that he now faces eviction from.
Among all its other achievements, Withnail and I is arguably the film that best demonstrates that a plot or storyline does not have to be epic, or even obviously dramatic, to be incredibly powerful and affecting.
In the story of one man coming to terms with the exploitative nature of the friendship that he has become entangled in, and finally escaping from it, Withnail and I captures the truth about so many relationships (especially so many male friendships) that have somehow continued long after they have become completely toxic.
‘Withnail and I’ (1987)
Great Dialogue
The second essential element of any great screenplay is great dialogue, and this is where Withnail and I really comes into its own.
If its plot is relatively ordinary, its dialogue is absolutely extraordinary, which is why I argued over a decade ago (an argument that I stand by today) that only Casablanca comes close to matching its seemingly infinite quotability.
The first exchange of dialogue in the film is mundane, involving I/Marwood asking (an unseen) Withnail whether he would like a cup of tea and Withnail (still unseen) replying, “No.” Yet in the café that Marwood decamps to, his first voiceover sets the tone for the flights of fancy, which are simultaneously poetic and defiantly prosaic, that he will often embark on during the rest of the film: “13 million Londoners have to cope with this, and baked beans and All-Bran and rape? And I’m sitting in this bloody shack and I can’t cope with Withnail. I must be out of my mind. I must go home at once and discuss his problems in depth.”
He does return home to Withnail but he emphatically does not “discuss his problems in depth” (problems that include a degree of self-absorption that would put Narcissus to shame). Instead, those “problems” are largely avoided until they can be avoided no more, and I/Marwood finally confronts Withnail, albeit in a decidedly non-confrontational way, at the end of the film.
In between, Robinson’s immaculate dialogue, honed over more than a decade and countless drafts of a screenplay that originally began as a novel, encompasses almost everything, or at least everything that was foremost in the minds of young people like Withnail and I/Marwood at the end of the 1960s: wealth and status, with Withnail saying of the cottage key he secures from Monty, “Free to those that can afford it. Very expensive to those that can’t”; politics, with Uncle Monty proclaiming that England and particularly those of his upper class have been “Shat on by Tories, shoveled up by Labour”; and even the Sixties themselves, with Drug Dealer Danny lamenting, “We are at the end of an age. The greatest decade in the history of mankind is nearly over. They’re selling hippy wigs in Woolworths. It is 91 days to the end of the decade and as Presuming Ed [his black sidekick and drug mule] here has so consistently pointed out, we have failed to paint it black.”
Perhaps the only universal human obsession that is not directly addressed is sex, and yet it is there throughout the film, hiding, as it were, in plain sight.
In the first instance, it is there in the character of Uncle Monty, the old and “raving homosexual” (as I/Marwood describes him) who pursues younger flesh, whether or not that younger flesh is interested in him. Ultimately it is there in the very last line of the film, in which Withnail quotes Hamlet to convey his Hamlet-like disgust with the world (including I/Marwood) that has rejected him: “Man delights not me, no, nor women neither, nor women neither.” The fact that this brilliantly delivered soliloquy, which proves that Withnail really can act, is delivered only to the disinterested wolves at London Zoo says it all about Withnail’s so-called “career” as an actor and, arguably, human ambition in general.
Robinson was an actor and for a time after leaving drama school a successful one at that, until he slipped into the post-drama school squalor that is alternatively celebrated and castigated in Withnail and I. Eventually, he stopped being an actor and became a writer—a great writer, as is proven by the script for Withnail and I alone. But he clearly never lost the actor’s ear for unforgettable dialogue and employed it to spectacular effect in his greatest screenplay.
See Withnail and I, and Read It for Yourself
Having seen and read Withnail and I so many times, especially while researching and writing a book about it, I can personally testify to its compelling, indeed haunting, genius.
But don’t take my word for it. If you haven’t seen or read it for yourself, do so as soon as possible, because I can virtually guarantee that you will enjoy it and be illuminated by it. And even if you have seen or read it before, see and read it again, because no other screenplay, with the possible exception of Casablanca, repays multiple viewings or readings so handsomely.
Richard E. Grant’s career comes full circle in The Franchise
By Tim Lowery
“I’m a trained actor reduced to the status of a bum!” cries Richard E. Grant’s Withnail early on in Withnail And I, delivering the line as if he’s Olivier at the Old Vic while he’s, in actuality, surrounded by the squalor of his Camden flat (and shirtless and slathered in lotion in a feeble attempt to keep warm), looking equally hungover and drug crazed and like he hasn’t slept days, and addressing or, better yet, performing for his roommate/drinking buddy, the “I” from the film’s title. It’s no stretch to say that Withnail is the role that made Richard E. Grant, who, before booking Bruce Robinson’s brilliant 1987 cult comedy, was not unlike his character, at least as far as career prospects: a struggling actor in London who was pushing 30 and whose opportunities felt fewer and farther between. “If Daniel Day-Lewis hadn’t turned down Withnail And I, I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you right now,” the actor told me over coffees with a smile during an interview in 2018, before saying that, even 30-plus years into a successful and impressive career in films with far, far more eyeballs that Withnail, the line he was most often asked to repeat in public was from his screen debut—specifically, “Monty, you terrible cunt!”
Whether or not you’re completely taken by HBO’s new comedy The Franchise, one of its inarguable, let’s-keep-watching-this-every-Sunday-night joys so far is that it has Grant back in full thespian-diva mode, channeling a bit of the same Entitled Actor Spirit that made him such a revelation in Withnail. In fact, it feels safe to assume that one of The Franchise’s network notes was something along the lines of “Needs more Richard E. Grant,” as the guy, playing veteran stage actor Peter, steals just about every scene he’s in, usually while butting heads with Eric (Daniel Brühl), the director of Tecto: Eye Of The Storm, the prospective Marvel-esque blockbuster that The Franchise documents the making of, or Adam (Billy Magnussen), Tecto’s sweet but, at least in the eyes of Peter, unserious and undeserving star.
To the former, he spits out, in the show’s second episode, the following in an attempt to be No. 1 on the call sheet even though he’s the film’s supporting character: “I’m very low maintenance. Now get that through your thick fucking skull, Daniel!” (By that installment’s end, he indeed becomes “1 A” on said call sheet.) And in the third episode, he grouses to Daniel again, this time about a note: “The distance between nodding and cowering is 100,000 miles,” he tells his director with drama-queen vigor before shifting into faux humility. “I’m sorry, I just cannot see my way to a cower. Lord knows I’ve tried.” As for the latter—that’s Adam, a nice-guy bro who’s very much Peter’s comedic foil—he’s more fond of ribbing if not outright insulting him, preferably in public, describing him in an on-set TV interview as ““instinctual like a bear or a hog. And I say this, you know, with respect. It’s like working with a chimpanzee.”
Series creator Jon Brown and the show’s writers (among them, the great Tony Roche of the deliciously cynical political satire The Thick Of It by Armando Iannucci, one of The Franchise’s executive producers) are clearly Withnail fans themselves, tossing in little nods to Grant’s character in the film throughout. “Morning, cunts!” Peter cheerfully greets the director & co. outside of his trailer, which recalls that aforementioned memorable line from Withnail. In a different episode, as the camera makes its way past that trailer, you can hear Peter yelling offscreen, dripping with indignation and drama, “How fucking dare you?” which has echoes of “How dare you?” in Withnail, when Grant’s wannabe thespian blasts “I” (played by Paul McGann) with a stage-worthy overreaction.
After nearly 40 years, Withnail has arrived on stage. Sean Foley directs Bruce Robinson’s adaptation, which starts with a live rock-band thumping out a few 1960s hits. The musicians take cameo roles as maids and coppers. The show needs a larger cast especially for the tea-room scene – ‘We want the finest wines available to humanity’ – which calls for a big crowd of crumbling old crocks. Never mind. The production would have thrilled diehard fans. As for newcomers, they would probably have been better to start with the film.
This production of Withnail would have thrilled diehard fans – newcomers less so
Robert Sheehan delivers a glitzy, karaoke version of Withnail which is all surface and very little inner torment. And that fits well with Adonis Siddique’s melancholy, pent-up Marwood who binds together the emotional twine on which the piece hangs. The balance between them is richer than in the film, where Paul McGann’s Marwood seems like an empty outline. Malcolm Sinclair lacks the menacing bulk of Richard Griffiths’s Uncle Monty and omits to wear make-up during the seduction scene. Rather than a queasy mound of flesh, he imagines Monty as an athletic, dandyish sorcerer. Kenneth Williams might have played it this way.
Alice Power’s ingenious multi-layered set moves effortlessly from the hovel in Camden to Uncle Monty’s townhouse via the Irish pub full of homophobic thugs. She plonks in a red phone box and adds a vintage sky-blue Jag – with one lamp blown out – that trundles on and off stage. These fixtures are easy to recreate, but some of the modifications don’t come off.
Withnail delivers his false urine sample beside the motorway rather than in a police station. It’s cumbersome and not hilarious. The country walks have been curtailed or relocated indoors. The scene with the charging bull becomes a duel between the principals who re-enact the Hamlet/Laertes sword fight with false sabres. This is a new scene and it looks terrific. It’s funny as well. (If anyone wants more of Withnail, they should read Robinson’s screenplay whose stage directions are as good as the dialogue.)
The strangest moment is the closing soliloquy spoken to the wolves at London Zoo, which seems weightless and underpowered. But the journey has only just started with this version, which may become part of the permanent repertoire along with Abigail’s Party and Educating Rita. The only drawback is the absence of decent roles for women. An all-female production can’t be far off.
Michael McManus’s affable new satire, Party Games!, resembles a lookalike contest. The year is 2026 and a general election has just wiped out both the Tories and the Labour party. Into the vacuum rushes a new centre-right grouping led by a bumptious, gaffe-prone clown, John Waggner, who likes to quote Latin and has a knack for populist rhetoric. Who could that be?
His glamorous young wife, Anne, strides around Downing Street showing off her designer gear while disclaiming any similarity to ‘Carrie Antoinette’. The new PM’s deputy is a combative northerner who likes to swing her fists. A female John Prescott, maybe. Among the PM’s advisers is a scruffy maverick from Northumberland, Seth Dickens, who wants to privatise the NHS, scrap the House of Lords and liberate all schools from state control. He uses a robot that collects private data about civil servants which is supposed to be a secret, even though it sits on a desk for all to see. Dickens, played by Ryan Early, dances on the spot during political discussions like a DJ at a rave which suggests that he doesn’t have enough to do on stage. He’s not the only actor trying to amplify his role with bits of business.
The story becomes a little unwieldly as the UK lurches from crisis to crisis. Power cuts interrupt the electricity supply while a volcanic ash-cloud threatens to ground all flights. Meanwhile, SNP plotters are making a grab for power as widespread rioting breaks out following a car-crash involving King Charles’s limousine, which has run into a pedestrian. A plan to reform the constitutional position of the monarchy coincides with a move to realign Britain with the single market, and so on and so forth.
The chief whip, wearing a Michael Fabricant wig, wanders around the place carrying a poisonous tarantula that’s likely to bite someone. Eventually it does. As the victim falls, the plot takes off. The show’s most attractive feature is its focus on wordplay. The PM believes that ‘nuclear’ is pronounced ‘unclear’ and that ‘log-sticks’ means the same as ‘logistics’. He suffers from the delusion that ‘FTSE’ refers to a form of toe-to-toe flirtation beneath the dinner-table.
There are many other enjoyable details squirrelled away. Waggner once served as an arts minister but when he told the tabloids he liked opera he became a hate figure. It’s clear that the writer has more interest in the psychological nuances of his subjects than he can display in this farcical show. A play with more broth and less froth might work better.
