I had never thought of Bruce Robinson’s Withnail and I as being theatre-infused. Too grime-groaning for that, what with rats in the oven, plastic bags on feet, the swigging of lighter fuel. Oh, and the carrot fixation: not only the adoration of the root vegetable (when “firm”) by Withnail’s sexually avid uncle, but the celebrated 12-skin spliff called “the Camberwell carrot”.
Yet Sean Foley’s production of Robinson’s new adaptation points up the original’s strong thespian thread. It is not only that the two non-heroes are out-of-work actors. The script nods to Chekhov, and bristles with quotes from Hamlet. Director and writer emphasise the theatricality by supplying an electric episode in which the two men duel around their damp cottage as Hamlet and Laertes. The very name Withnail could have been invented for a minor Shakespearean clown.
All this might seem to justify making a stage play out of a cult film. In fact, the theatricality diminishes the action, which takes on the air of a frolicsome satire on actors, with little dangerous edge. True, Adonis Siddique is persuasive as Marwood, the downbeat “I”of the title – who, like the narrator of Rebecca, is never addressed by name. True, Malcolm Sinclair – sideways glances, plus-fours, sidling – sends out forlorn ripples as Uncle Monty. Yet as Withnail, Robert Sheehan is so nonstop flamboyant that he might be auditioning. Richard E Grant let his richly expressed contempt – not all directed at other people – roll off him luxuriously: Sheehan energetically projects.
Alice Power’s design and Akhila Krishnan’s videos whiz through city and countryside. There is bounce and drunken blur and a strong live band that kicks off with A Whiter Shade of Pale. Fans already mumble along with the best lines. What there is not is a new play.
Spirited away? No. Impressed by the tenacious ingenuity of John Caird’s production? Yes. My Neighbour Totoro, which transfers to the West End next year, proved that Studio Ghibli’s work can excite a theatre. Nevertheless, putting Spirited Away on the London stage was no pushover: it involves translation not only from Japanese to English and screen to stage but, crucially, from human to otherworldly, flesh to spirit.
This tale of a young girl getting lost and finding a new self in a dreamworld of spirits was floated into peculiarity by the 2001 movie’s spindly lines and melting vistas. Caird’s production is more energetic than evanescent. Jon Bausor’s design clambers all over the stage, creating bath house, white-screened bedroom, bulging boiler, sylvan glade. Joe Hisaishi’s music pumps out constantly, sometimes delicately, sometimes signalling the brass neck of the heroine, plucky but less defiant than Alice in Wonderland.
Puppeteer Toby Olié has made creatures close to those in the film yet occasionally with different twists – a witch looks more like Margaret Thatcher; the Stink Spirit comes on less like diarrhoea than plughole hair. He also provides flashes of grace: in the sinuous elegance of No-Face: a draped black column and white plate-like mask. In the turquoise dragon that flies over the heads of the audience, light as tissue paper, twisting in a breeze. In the moments when characters are half glimpsed, half hidden under gauzy veils.
Still, when you can list the effects, however striking, something else is not happening: a transformation, a dissolve of one thing into another. That needs more than the skills which motor this production: it needs a jolt of feeling. Constant animation does not always mean vivacity.
It is the fusion of Robert Wilson’s incandescent production that makes Mary Said What She Said (2019) so remarkable. Of course the focus is the gleam of Isabelle Huppert’s performance: both fragile and gimlet. Portraying Mary Queen of Scots from marriage to death, France to Scotland, her monologue is a maze of Marys, composed of the queen’s maids and her own fractured selves. Huppert begins as a silhouette, like a musical-box ballerina with tiny topknot and stiff skirt. She becomes an automaton, gliding as if pushed by history and unseen male hands. Seen in detail, she is encrusted with embroidery, sometimes with a white clown face, her mouth frozen open in a howl, as if she had escaped from Beckett’s Not I (at which the text winks). You could hardly call her mad when she yells and babbles: what would be the sane reaction to continuous persecution?
Still, the wonder of the production is that you can’t see the joins between performance, design and script. Wilson’s hallucinatory lighting announces who this Mary is: sometimes glacial pale blue, then spirited ginger.
Ludovico Einaudi’s score needles her with strings and gives her rest with piano interludes. Darryl Pinckney’s script swings in close – to show us the Marys sewing or playing with jewels – and spins out for a wider view, snubbing an entire country as “land of fog and urinating sheep”. In his 2022 mind-whirl memoir, Come Back in September, Pinckney showed how literature can wake you up: now he is part of a play which proves that theatre can do the same.
I came late to James Macdonald’s terrific production of Sam Grabiner’s excellent debut play, Boys on the Verge of Tears, which spins wittily, harshly, dangerously, sweetly through ages of maleness – and is set in a men’s lav. A packed-out run at the Soho theatre has just ended: I hope it’s on the verge of a transfer.
Star ratings (out of five)
Withnail and I ★★★
Spirited Away ★★★
Mary Said What She Said ★★★★
Boys on the Verge of Tears ★★★★
