‘It’s not a jukebox musical,” an indignant Wilko Johnson (Johnson Willis) says midway through the evening. “It’s a play – with music.” Fair enough. Playwright Jonathan Maitland tours the mind and memory of a pub rock pioneer (Dr Feelgood, the Blockheads) whose ambitions roamed beyond music.
Although guitars and drum kit lurk tantalisingly at the back, we’re well into the show before we hear a lick of the Feelgood sound. Nicolai Hart-Hansen’s light, scrubbed design seems ready for either a gig or an operation – and we begin in hospital as Wilko is given a cancer diagnosis and less than a year to live. He’s undaunted: “I can be more alive than I have ever been,” he exults.
A rhapsodic Wilko quotes Wordsworth, Eliot and ancient Icelandic poetry. He traces his roots back to a Canvey Island childhood with a bullying dad and ambitious mum (“snobbery is the bastard offspring of aspiration”). A proud but unsentimental Essex boy, he turns its everyday into myth. The oil refinery is an “Essex-based suburb of Hades”; a date at the jetty becomes “percussive poetry”.
Maitland has drawn several plays from recent British history: Diana, Princess of Wales; Jimmy Savile; Geoffrey Howe’s last stand. It can feel like the Wikipedia school of biodrama, but here he places Wilko at the wheel, driving his story. The great asset in Dugald Bruce-Lockhart’s nifty production, which features songs including She Does it Right and All Through the City, is Willis’s stonking central performance. Black-suited and booted, speaking in an arresting gargoyle drawl, he’s wonderfully gobby and confiding. Willis locates the youth within, red-faced and raging. Teachers who mock his glottal stop, band mates who reject his songs: he’s quick to scorched-earth rage, and only his wife stays the course.
Nostalgia is baked into this material – especially as the casting makes Dr Feelgood seem less a pack of bolshy young pups than a dad-rock tribute act. Despite Wilko’s defiance – “You don’t have to live forever,” he declares, “you just have to live!” – his memories feel more compelling than his seize-the-moment present. The second act drifts towards a dream-time coda that reunites the band, Willis and Jon House’s soulfully bearish Lee Brilleaux stomping beneath the coloured lights.
At Queen’s theatre, Hornchurch, until 24 February
