Wilko – Love and Death and Rock ‘n’ Roll at Southwark Playhouse review: 'remarkably dull and utterly leaden'

The remarkable story of a singular English talent is very poorly told here. Wilko Johnson was the machine-gun guitarist for 70s Essex pub rockers Dr. Feelgood. He helped invent punk and influenced generations of musicians.

He also devoured drugs and ecstatic literature in vast quantities, shagged around on the teenage sweetheart he married and adored, then cheated a terminal cancer diagnosis. Oh, and he made his acting debut aged 64 as a sinister executioner in Game of Thrones in 2011, which he described as “easy”.

You won’t believe quite how dull this becomes in writer Jonathan Maitland’s laboriously superficial, by-the-numbers telling, prosaically staged by director Dugald Bruce-Lockhart in a Canvey Island living room dotted with instruments.

In the lead role Johnson Willis (cast by nominative determinism, presumably) is a gawping, stiff-armed man-child, far removed from the menacing charisma Wilko apparently projected on and off stage.

Fortunately, he and the actors playing his bandmates are halfway decent musicians. The occasional performances of Feelgood songs – She Does It Right, All Through the City, Roxette – come as blessed injections of excitement. The performers get more to work with here than they do from the script.

We first see Wilko in 2013, unexpectedly invigorated by a diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer - “a great career move for a rock star” that gives him “the comfort of clarity”. He decides he’ll eschew treatment, play gigs, record an album with his old mucker Roger Daltry, and relish the beautiful in the mundane until he dies. But first – oh god – he talks us through his life.

His dad thumps him once and his mum tells him to stop dropping his aitches. That’s his childhood dealt with. In a teenage skiffle band, he pulls then marries the beautiful Irene Knight (Georgina Fairbanks), and that’s the end of her character arc, pretty much, apart from one argument about his infidelities. A little more time is given to his poetic ability to find Wordsworthian inspiration in Canvey and Southend, his wish to create a style his own rather than just cover blues standards.

(Mark Sepple)

What’s really missing is any sense of the thrill of being in a band or the milieu in which Feelgood swam. There’s zero political context and the only musical contemporaries Wilko mentions are Daltry, and Lemmy from Motörhead (in an aside about the third day on speed feeling like Rice Krispies have been poured into your head).

Instead we get generic rehearsal room bickering between him and frontman Lee Brilleaux (Jon House) while bassist Sparko and drummer Big Figure grunt and gurn in the background. Oh, and there are endless explanations.

They all changed their names because three of them, including Wilko, were really called John. I actually think I died, went to purgatory and was resurrected during Brilleaux’s monologue about how his hair used to look like a Brillo pad but his stage name will be spelled differently.

At one point, Irene marches offstage brandishing a brick to confront one of Wilko’s creditors. We hear glass breaking. She comes back brickless. “You. Put. A. Brick. Through. His. WINDOW,” Wilko marvels, like a simpleton. In the second half, the doctor who re-diagnoses Wilko’s cancer as operable describes it as a melon that could be peeled like an orange leaving the musician as “the cherry on top”. Sorry, what?

Maitland, formerly an eminent broadcast journalist, has a reputation as a playwright who entertainingly dramatizes real people and situations, which baffles me. The Interview, about Martin Bashir’s Panorama confab with Princess Diana, at the Park theatre in 2023, was clunky and morally suspect. Wilko is worse than that. It’s dull and utterly leaden, when Mr Johnson’s story positively howls for menace, abandon and excitement.

Southwark Playhouse Borough, to April 19; southwarkplayhouse.co.uk