Withnail and I - Birmingham Rep

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Fri 03 May 2024 - Sat 25 May 2024

Author and screenwriter Bruce Robinson, who first created Withnail and I, has returned to the story to adapt if for the stage. The tale, which is based on Bruce's own life as an out-of-work actor, is now about to find a new life as a theatre production at Birmingham Rep directed by The Rep's artistic director Sean Foley.

Bruce still vividly remembers the moment the story, about two broke and unemployed actors who go on a bizarre holiday, began to form in his mind. “I was in this house in Camden with no furniture and one light bulb and mattresses on the floor and feeling so f***ed because I couldn’t get any work and I had no money,” he says. “I did genuinely sink to my knees to weep. Then I just got a shot of myself, somehow from a subjective point of view, of this 23-year-old out-of-work actor on his knees about to weep and I just started laughing at myself, thinking you are just ridiculous. And that is when I started writing it. I really genuinely didn’t know where it was going to go but it was just pouring out and making me laugh my head off. I really enjoyed writing it.”



Bruce based the story, which he originally wrote as a novel, on a group of friends from his days as a student at Central School of Speech and Drama in London. “I met these amazing guys,” he recalls. “There was Vivian MacKerrell, and he was a kind of template for Withnail, and Mickey Feast, Mike Elphick who played the Poacher in the film and David Dundas who composed the music for Withnail. We were all part of the same gang at Central School and it was all of us I was writing about.”

And he continues: “Mickey and I, in about 1968, were trying to write a screenplay together called Private Pirates and we were kind of stuck in Camden Town where we lived. We saw this advert in the paper saying ‘cottage available in the Lake District for hire for £10 a week’ so Mickey and I got in this old Jag and drove up to this cottage to try and write. And what happened was what sort of happens in the movie, you know the plastic bags on our feet and being attacked by a bull. And we didn’t realise, well I didn’t realise, that I was going to abandon Private Pirates and turn that week in the English countryside into Withnail and I.”

The film was released in 1987 with Richard E Grant as Withnail, Paul McGann as the ‘I’ character Marwood and Richard Griffiths as the cottage owner Uncle Monty. But Withnail and I wasn’t an overnight hit. “Its success has been incremental,” Bruce says. “It came out and then went away and then it coincided with TV and videos and all of that and it built a much wider audience than it already had. I think it appeals to something subliminal in our subconscious of the fact we’ve all been in a place of youth where we don’t give a damn. We’re high as a kite, pi**ed as a newt and we’ve all been there and done all those silly things.”

But the story also has a melancholy note, he says. “Until relatively recently I hadn’t seen it for years and I hadn’t realised that, like the proverbial stick of Brighton rock, it has a sadness running through it that’s quite profound in a way. It’s that transition that we’ve all made from being a young person into becoming an adult. The film recognises the sadness of that transition that you’ve got to go out there now and earn a living. You can’t just get drunk and rush around in high heels pretending to be a rock star.”

Bruce’s career has seen him mix acting, writing, adapting and directing. He has appeared in films directed by Franco Zeffirelli, François Truffaut and Ken Russell, he wrote the screenplay for Roland Joffé’s The Killing Fields, for which he won a BAFTA, and he directed How to Get Ahead in Advertising which again featured Richard E Grant.



And Bruce admits to having some nostalgia for his younger self. “When I lived in Camden Town 50 odd years ago, I was a kid literally with no money. You used to get four pence back on a bottle of Guinness and we used to go around collecting the bottles and we’d take them back to the off licence, literally bags full of these bottles, and that was just about enough to get a bottle of cheap Hock or something like that and then we’d sit there and yap all night, drinking. But those were also the days when there was great hope in our country. When young people for the first time had a few quid in their pockets and they wanted to spend it on fashion and having haircuts and above all music. It was an exciting time to be young, it really was, and now young people are pretty much in despair.”

Bruce is hoping a generation of these younger people will discover Withnail and I through the stage production. “This new show is like putting up a fifty-year-old baby for adoption from my point of view,” he says. “I’m amazed and flattered that the thing I wrote when I was a kid on a kitchen table is still alive and kicking, it’s astonishing to me. Let’s hope that it finds an audience of young people as it’s a young person’s story.”

Returning to the narrative after so much time has also given Bruce a chance to make a few tweaks largely around ensuring the story works on stage. “I didn’t really re-write it but I’ve adjusted it for the theatre. I tried to stay as faithful to the original as I possibly could because the people who seem to love Withnail don’t want to hear a bunch of new characters or dialogue. They want Withnail to be Withnail. I have written a few bits, particularly for Uncle Monty, there’s some new dialogue there but basically it’s trying to transport what the movie was onto the boards.”

Withnail and I fans may be surprised to learn that Bruce has another story from his past up his sleeve. “I wrote an autobiographical novel a few years ago which I turned into a screenplay,” he says. “It’s a precursor to Withnail and I, it’s about my childhood and sort of escaping childhood. It’s as funny as Withnail, it’s got some sadness too, and I’d just love to make it into a film.”

Withnail and I plays Birmingham Rep on May 3-25, see here for more information and tickets.

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