The pernicious cult of Withnail

“I demand to have some booze!” With those words, Bruce Robinson’s 1987 cult comedy Withnail and I slammed down its glass into cinematic history, making a star of its lead actor Richard E Grant and ensuring that it entered the culture as one of the most quotable British films ever made. Although its tale of two out-of-work actors at the tail-end of the 1960s heading to the Lake District cottage of the protagonist’s gay uncle, with unpredictable results, was commercially unsuccessful on its initial release, it soon became a hit with the cognoscenti. Grant’s memoir With Nails is full of amusing detail about his being pestered at Hollywood parties by the film’s unlikely fans, who included everyone from Demi Moore to Steven Spielberg.

Then, after the late and semi-lamented Loaded magazine bestowed New Lad honours upon Withnail in the 1990s, exhorting its readers to match the film’s characters drink for drink, it has become the boozy extrovert’s movie of choice, trumping even Spinal Tap for the fervour of its admirers’ devotion to it. Fan screenings, cosplay, increasingly elaborate home-video releases… all have followed. Last year, the author Toby Benjamin rounded up everyone involved with the film (with the exception of the late Richard Griffiths and Michael Elphick) and published a book, Withnail and I: From Cult to Classic, that handled its production and reception with a reverence that would not have disgraced a children’s version of the story of Jesus.

Talking of resurrections, the story of Withnail is about to get its own second coming—in the form of a new stage production at Birmingham’s Rep theatre. Opening tomorrow and closing again a mere three weeks after—one can only hope for a national tour and/or a London transfer—it is adapted by Robinson from his original screenplay (and, perhaps, the novel he wrote that served as its basis), directed by the Rep’s outgoing artistic director Sean Foley, and stars both Robert Sheeran, who will take on the near-impossible task of erasing memories of Grant from the central role, and Adonis Siddique as Marwood, the “I” of the title. That fine classical actor Malcolm Sinclair, meanwhile, is certain to be a cherishable Uncle Monty, replacing Griffiths’s bulk and physical presence with his usual sly élan.

Nothing is likely to disband the frenzied cult of catchphrases and drinking games that has built up around Withnail over the past few decades, but I do hope that Foley and Robinson’s new production won’t, at least, give in to all that. After all, the original has tremendous theatrical qualities that deserve bringing out. Not only is Withnail a story that features actors (with Monty, too, being someone who “crept the boards in [his] youth”), but it is also deeply in love with acting and performance. It is a cliché to call any film with tragicomic elements “Chekhovian”, but there is something of The Seagull—with its self-dramatising protagonist Arkadina—about this film, its characters forever suspended between artifice and reality. (Even if Withnail responds to his agent offering him work by complaining: “Bastard asked me to understudy Konstantin in The Seagull. I’m not going to understudy anybody. Especially that pimp! Anyway, I loathe those Russian plays. Always full of women staring out of windows, whining about ducks going to Moscow.”)

It’s not for nothing that Robinson’s original conception of the film ended with Withnail shooting himself after drinking a vintage Margaux from both barrels of a shotgun—just as Konstantin ends his life in despair, believing that his artistic legacy has been destroyed. As it is, the film’s final scene doesn’t feature death, but it’s still tonally and thematically similar. Withnail’s Hamlet-alluding realisation that his only friend has abandoned him in order to pursue a more successful life and career elsewhere cruelly encapsulates a line of Monty’s from earlier in the film: “It is the most shattering experience of a young man’s life when one morning he awakes and quite reasonably says to himself, ‘I will never play the Dane.’ When that moment comes, one’s ambition ceases.”

Withnail is also, in its warped way, a romance. The question of homosexuality hangs heavy over the picture, both in its farcical moments of gay panic—Marwood, called a “perfumed ponce” by a loud Irishman in a pub because he’s applied perfume to his vomit-encrusted shoes, frantically questions his fate by looking at the graffiti in the loo, babbling “I fuck arses. Who fucks arses? Maybe he fucks arses!”—and in the character of Monty, whom Robinson and his producer Denis O’Brien fundamentally disagreed about. Robinson, who based Monty on the director Franco Zeffirelli—who cast him as Benvolio in his 1968 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet because, in Robinson’s typically pungent recollection, “he wanted my arse”—saw him as a sweet-natured and rather lonely man whose comically absurd advances towards Marwood in the cottage are then redeemed by his embarrassed off-screen departure when he eventually realises that he has been the victim of Withnail’s chicanery. Whereas O’Brien wanted Monty to be a camp, Kenneth Williams-esque queen. Robinson—and Griffiths, for that matter—won, and the performance remains indelible.

However, Monty is also a lightning rod of sorts for the love that dare not speak its name between Withnail and Marwood. Neither man shows any interest in women—the closest Withnail ever comes to demonstrating any heterosexual awareness is to shout “Scrubbers!” at a group of unimpressed schoolgirls they drive past—and the relationship between the two, all co-dependency and quarrelling and silent reconciliation, is much like many long-standing marriages. It is now more or less accepted by the film’s admirers that Withnail is gay, whether active or otherwise, and that Marwood’s rejection of him at the end is as much a romantic dismissal as it is a career move.

But what of Marwood himself? Received appreciation suggests that his terror at Monty’s advances—and at the threat of buggery at every street corner—is that of any naïve, young heterosexual man still pretty enough to garner unwelcome attention and without the physical stature to laugh or fight off his assailants. Yet surely the film works even better if the implication is that Marwood and Withnail really have been an item, as he frantically tells Monty while fending him off, and that their relationship has suffered from that common complaint of many hard-drinking couples? The realisation that, as the Porter says of alcohol in Macbeth, “it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance”.

When the less-than-dynamic duo take to the stage tomorrow, the faithful will be watching avidly to see whether Robinson has tweaked the narrative at all. We already know that the famous deleted scene of a swordfight in the cottage has been restored as a quid pro quo for the inevitable removal of the moment in which Marwood is threatened by a randy bull. Perhaps the original, even darker ending will be reinstated.

But what is hopeful is that, with these new actors reincarnating some of the most beloved characters from British cinema, the pernicious cult of catchphrases might be replaced by something else entirely, if only for one evening: a quiet and serious appreciation of how very poignant this most reflective of comedies remains, of how ineffably sad its almighty hangover ends up being.