Tag Archives: Cahoots Theatre Company

WILKO

★★★

Southwark Playhouse Borough

WILKO

Southwark Playhouse Borough

★★★

“None of what follows would be remotely plausible without the sterling performance of Johnson Willis who wholly inhabits the fractious rebel”

Stilted Guitar Dalek, poet, philosopher and musical pioneer Wilko Johnson enjoys yet another resurgence in writer Jonathan Maitland’s affectionate stage biography.

The Dr Feelgood founder was famously diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2012 but remarkably lived another decade or so. At his farewell concert in Camden in 2013 he was so spritely for a dead man walking that a doctor friend suggested he might be a candidate for a life-saving op. And so it came about.

However, we meet the musician just after his initial diagnosis and find him in good spirits.
“I can live with it,” he says of his cancer. “I can be alive with it.”

The death sentence takes him back to the beginning, to his Canvey Island youth, abusive father, teenage love and musical escape.

None of what follows would be remotely plausible without the sterling performance of Johnson Willis who wholly inhabits the fractious rebel. His nasal intonation, coupled with his studied over pronunciation and stiff physicality bring to mind Kenneth Williams as a Thunderbirds puppet.

Director Dugald Bruce-Lockhart’s production takes us on a journey of Essex, drugs and rock’n’roll as Wilko discovers a way of adapting the blues to fit his version of England – all oil terminals, chip shops and clinches under the pier. Dr Feelgood produce a clipped and insistent interpretation of R&B that brings them chart success and paves the way for punk.

The cast, who previously provided cameos to illustrate Wilko’s fragmented origin story, comes together to form Dr Feelgood and everything makes sense, both for Wilko and the audience.

Georgina Field (bass), David John (drums), and Jon House (vocals and harmonica) are a tight unit. House’s Lee Brilleaux, in particular, brings his A-game to offer up a rug-burning explosion of dad rock.

In Maitland’s unbalanced re-telling, the play rushes past the Dr Feelgood heyday too early, dismissing the intriguing artistic spat between Wilko and Brilleaux in a few unhelpful lines. The reasons why Dr Feelgood went on to greater success without their destructive songwriter are never explored.

Afterwards, with Wilko drifting, the play seems to run out of momentum, and we are left – along with Wilko – mourning the passing of his sparky wife Irene (a lovely performance by Georgina Fairbanks) who stayed with him despite his numerous cruel infidelities.

Little wonder then that the production uses Wilko’s second lease of life and his Scrooge-like transformation to bring about a fantasy Dr Feelgood reunion gig which adds little dramatic coherence but gives the audience what they want when they need it most.

The Guardian once wrote that Wilko Johnson was “a 100-1 shot to be our Greatest Living Englishman”. We get glimpses of that cantankerous, selfish, charismatic and much-cherished artist, but this production is frustratingly incurious about the contradictions, aspiring to be kind rather than clinical. Feelgood by name…



WILKO

Southwark Playhouse Borough

Reviewed on 24th March 2025

by Giles Broadbent

Photography by Mark Sepple

 

 


 

 

 

Previously reviewed at this venue:

SON OF A BITCH | ★★★★ | February 2025
SCISSORHANDZ | ★★★ | January 2025
CANNED GOODS | ★★★ | January 2025
THE MASSIVE TRAGEDY OF MADAME BOVARY | ★★★ | December 2024
THE HAPPIEST MAN ON EARTH | ★★★★★ | November 2024
[TITLE OF SHOW] | ★★★ | November 2024
THE UNGODLY | ★★★ | October 2024
FOREVERLAND | ★★★★ | October 2024
JULIUS CAESAR | ★★★ | September 2024
DORIAN: THE MUSICAL | ★★½ | July 2024
THE BLEEDING TREE | ★★★★ | June 2024
FUN AT THE BEACH ROMP-BOMP-A-LOMP!! | ★★★ | May 2024

WILKO

WILKO

WILKO

DUET

★★★

Theatre at the Tabard

DUET at Theatre at the Tabard

★★★

“And while the intimacy of the piece is fitting, Morgan and Straus fail to capture the richness and depth of the legendary characters”

More than a century before our Celebrity Culture took hold, the legendary actors Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse became the pioneers of superstardom. Their rivalry has been said to have changed acting forever, becoming two of the first to achieve lasting worldwide fame. George Bernard Shaw almost certainly fuelled their enmity, praising Duse for ‘the best modern acting I have ever seen’, going on to say that while Bernhardt was ‘charming, artful and clever’, Duse ‘touches you straight on the very heart’.

Their approach to their art couldn’t have been more dissimilar. Duse favoured a naturalistic and contemporary style, using the power of emotion on stage while Bernhardt adopted the method style of acting with flamboyant gestures. Yet they still shared the same passion and should have – could have – been friends. Their story is of two people who had too much in common but were as different as night and day. Otho Eskin, in his play “Duet” imagines a final meeting of the two; one month before Duse’s death and a year after Bernhardt’s.

Duse (Cynthia Straus) is in ill-health, backstage at a theatre in Pittsburgh. Alone and far from home she is about to perform, for the very last time, as Marguerite in Alexandre Dumas’ “La Dame Aux Camelias”. A role she has played many times before, and one which Bernhardt made famous. Threatening to cancel the performance she sends the theatre manager away so she can be left with her own reflections. Only it isn’t herself she sees, but the ghost of Bernhardt (Wendy Morgan) who wanders into her dressing room threatening to upstage her once more.

Duse initially reacts like a cornered cat. ‘You don’t belong here anymore’. Bernhardt fails to tame her: ‘We could have been friends’. ‘No’ replies Duse bluntly. The initial antagonism slowly gives way to a resignation that the two are confined together until they settle some sort of score. Over the next ninety minutes we witness their differences slowly bringing them together, while a diffident affection tugs at the hems of their overblown egos.

Ludovica Villar-Hauser’s unostentatious staging neatly cuts from their dialogue to flashbacks and reminiscences. They are fragments that shed some light on their backstories, focusing on a pivotal moment when Duse went to Paris to play Marguerite – a role that Bernhardt claimed was hers alone. Throughout their ghostly encounter, Nick Waring comes and goes as the various men who weave in and out of their professional and personal lives.

The crucial questions, though, remain unanswered. And while the intimacy of the piece is fitting, Morgan and Straus fail to capture the richness and depth of the legendary characters. We are seeing them both with their masks down, yet we never really do get a glimpse of what might have lain beneath. Eskin has done his research, but the somewhat flat delivery presses the dialogue into a monochrome portrayal. The sense of mystery or discovery we were expecting becomes the ghostly presence that the writer and performers can never quite grasp. And, as a result, neither can we.

 


DUET at Theatre at the Tabard

Reviewed on 19th April 2024

by Jonathan Evans

Photography by Ali Wright

 

 

 

 

Previously reviewed at this venue:

THE SECRET GARDEN | ★★★★ | December 2023
ABOUT BILL | ★★★★★ | August 2023

DUET

DUET

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