“Withnail And I” and the Great British Tradition of Tragicomedy

" We are indeed drifting into the arena of the unwell."

Testing Britishness:

In the revealing neon red glare of right wing politics in the air in 2016 the debate as to whether Norman Tebbit’s infamous and controversial “Cricket Test” was morally justifiable has undergone a transformation. Tebbit, an indefinitely nasty skeleton of a man, proposed that the question of whether South Asian and Caribbean migrants in the UK would support England or their home nation in a cricket match could be used as some sort of barometer of multicultural cohesion.

The implication was that those migrants who would support their home country’s cricket team were not welcome.

What Mr Tebbit does not know is that at around the same time, when I was 7, I proposed a test to determine whether British people were cunts. I called it the “Tough Luck” test; the question British people needed to be asked was whether, having ripped off the Indian Subcontinent, Africa and the Caribbean in ways which are barely imaginable, over the course of centuries, the British could accept the concept of colonial immigration from these places, even if unwanted, as their own generation’s “tough luck” to make amends for the past.

Norman Tebbit would fail my test. In his own indefatigable mentality of British coloniser entitlement, Tebbit might counterargue that my test is illegitimate because it does not capture the potential hazards to the British people of the reluctance to integrate amongst certain migrants in the UK, such as terrorism and social unrest. You might even think he would have a fair point.

But that is because you might be stupid.

Whether people support the cricket team of their country of birth or the English one bears little more relation to their likelihood of suicide bombing than it does to fairies and unicorns. I have plenty of Polish and Romanian friends in London who would support the Polish or Romanian football team instead of the English one, but that does not speak a great deal about their level of cultural assimilation or propensity to commit crimes of terrorist violence.

Why were Asian and black people expected to outwardly demonstrate a higher level of patriotic loyalty than A8 or A2 migrants have been?

Does the Cricket Test speak more of the greater level of hostility that the former met with upon arrival in the UK on account of their skin colour than it does of the people it was applied to?

Perhaps the existence of a test which Tebbit designed to gauge loyalty to the state even explains in part why certain ethnic groups ultimately failed to assimilate.

Perhaps Great Britain would not have been quite so paranoid about the arrival of colonial migrants if their countries had not been exploited quite so violently and ruthlessly.

That was 1990. And that was the dark side of Great Britain.

Although I do not share many views with Tebbit, I would be prepared to posit the application of a test for far more innocuous ends.

Colonial arrogance is not a British character trait which I have ever admired.

However there are facets of the British identity which I would make a strong case for, and something which would delight Norman Tebbit is that one of them could very probably be used to determine how “British” someone is.

My mother, a former English Literature university lecturer, has always contested that tragicomedy in the way we use the word today is an exclusively British invention.

And as any self respecting British person of fine taste and erudition will tell you, if you want to test how British someone is, you must demand that they watch and enjoy the cult 1987 film “Withnail And I”.

Discussing my love of the film a few years ago with a friend of a friend whose badly scarring facial birthmark had obviously also left its imprint upon his personality (he is an interesting if rancorous figure whom we referred to as “Two Face” and often expressed support of extreme right wing causes), he scoffed: “Meh. It was ok. It was very British” by means of critique.

I have also discussed the film with some of the quite probably tiny proportion of Americans who have seen the film, perhaps having been guided by Anglophilia or by an appetite for films outside of the mainstream, who simply viewed the film as intolerably bleak.

These were big wake up calls that I was most likely much more British than I had cared to admit. Of course I had always understood that the film has a certain type of appeal to a quite narrow white, middle class, artsy and male demographic.

What I did not understand fully yet at that age however was quite how much humour is lost in translation when a tragicomedy vehicle meets with a foreign audience.

The UK is a very strange place.

I think at some level even from a very young age I have always known this.

I have spent some time in Iceland in the latter part of 2016 (another small, wealthy, Western European island), which gave me some form of perverse parallel perspective of exactly how the geographical isolation and climate of this country impacted upon the spirit of its people.

“Iceland the social space” is a white, upper middle class Hipster bubble of new trends and new strands of cool. People are generally healthy and happy.

But “Iceland the lump of rock in the North Atlantic” despite its own unique sort of bleakly desolate beauty is at the same time at times and in places uninhabitable.

A resulting need for escapism seems to manifest itself in its young peoples’ relationship to drink and drugs.

Even as modernity renders the influence of geography upon a country’s material culture less and less conspicuous, British culture in turn is similarly and unquestionably indebted to Britain as a physical environment.

I could point to the frequent setting of the Victorian Gothic tradition in the Yorkshire Moors by way of example for the uneducated, but suffice it to say, that Withnail and I itself very much places its two central characters against the elements of nature, and the urban environment.

One factor which makes Withnail and I such an exclusively British artistic achievement is the film’s tour of the varying British types of landscape, from the bleakly Gothic squalor of Camden as a sort of proto-Hipster dirty Victorian suburb in the 1960s, to the isolated dales of the Lake District, to the drab claustrophic trappings of small village life.

Withnail and I presents itself as a buddy movie, but make no mistake. Easy Rider this is not.

The two central characters are not streetwise bikers fighting gangs; they are well spoken aspiring actors storming tea shops in provincial England and harassing old ladies, whilst demanding “the finest wines available to humanity”.

What comes across is a sense of how small this Little Island really is, notionally by virtue of the fact that you can drive from one end of the UK to the other, in hours as opposed to days.

The second factor is of course the film’s willingness to explore the ill defined and at times indecipherable landscape of English tragicomedy, a genre which has suffered from a lack of serious critical recognition and has often been viewed as merely the bastard child of tragedy and comedy.

British Comedy Believes In Pain:

Tragedy and comedy.

Should those two things ever really go together?

In the UK they often have done. Britain is a country which very much believes in comedy’s use of pain. There is accordingly without a doubt a level of sadism in the modern remnants of the tragicomic tradition.

The driving force in tragicomedy is the farcical and the absurd. In Frank Humphrey Ristine’s seminal book, “English Tragicomedy, Its Origin and History”, he writes “The essential lack of the integrating qualities that make for lasting drama is the besetting fault of tragicomedy. It presents no transcript from life. It neglects portrayal of psychological analysis for plot and theatricality. It substitutes dramatic falsity for dramatic truth. It emphasises novelty, sensation, surprise, startling effect. All is unreal.”

Ristine was an academic with a very narrow definition of tragicomedy as a genre confined to the past. However he was writing in 1910 and like many academics, his view was shortsighted and finalistic. He did not then know that Shakespearean tragicomedy was about to undergo a spectacular evolution with the likes of Samuel Beckett, Tom Stoppard, John Arden, Alan Ayckbourn and Harold Pinter.

I would argue not only that tragicomedy has evolved beyond the purist constraints of the defining characteristics of the genre which he described, but in fact that it does retain much of this essence of absurdity.

The Office, one of the UK’s most successful ever sitcoms, makes use of tragicomic elements, especially farce and absurdity, perhaps because Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant were intelligent enough to appreciate that without those elements affording him the frailties of humanity, David Brent would just be a very unlikeable central character in whom the audience would never feel sufficiently emotionally invested.

In the British version of The Office, the sadistic underbelly of tragicomedy makes its presence felt indeed.

The scene in episode 5 of Series 2, the ironically titled “Charity”, in which David Brent is made redundant betrays the writers’ very deep understanding of the English farcical tradition. Mid conversation, David Brent stands up to reveal that he has in fact been fired whilst being dressed in a Bernie Clifton ostrich costume.

The scene is one of the most wickedly funny in the history British television comedy, not least because Gervais knows exactly what he is doing. The scene is genuinely dramatic and his acting is fantastic. However each time he gestures to his new manager angrily, he does so with the head of the bird costume, creating an offbeat slapstick comedy effect.

Further mileage is then extracted when Brent leaves his office heading for the open plan office floor to reveal that he has just been made redundant to his colleagues, who suffer the double shock of his dramatic news and his ridiculous appearance. The scene is ridiculously, absurdly funny but also very very sad. It is hard not to laugh at Brent. But as the scene uncovers his mask of egotistical pomposity to reveal that all along he was just an idiot in a bird costume, it is also hard not to feel sorry for him.

A critical favourite, The Office’s brand of tragicomic cringe inducing humour nonetheless did repulse many viewers. I have friends who say that they could never bring themselves to watch it, because of the feelings of conflicted awkwardness it induces.

But if The Office used farce and tragicomedic elements as a counterpoint to its laugh out loud moments, the one British television show in recent years which put both feet firmly in the camp of tragicomedy was Marion and Geoff.

A little known cult hit, starring and written by the vastly underrated comic talent Rob Brydon, and Hugo Blick, Marion and Geoff was a mockumentary series which was delivered as a series of monologues in which the protagonist, Keith Barrett, played by Brydon, discusses his divorce from his wife and progressive estrangement from his children.

A kindly and naive man, Keith Barrett tries to talk himself into seeing positives in the situation, even when his ex wife tries to block him from spending time with his children. The monologues contain clues to the viewer that his former wife in fact had a long standing affair with Barrett’s colleague, and is likely the father of one of “his” children, although Barrett himself does not realise it.

"I don't look at it as losing a wife," he says, reflecting on Marion's relationship with colleague Geoff outside his old home in his taxi, "I look at it as gaining a friend."

If this all sounds to you like somewhat and dark and dreary subject matter for a sitcom, that is because it is. Remember how the Tom Hardy film Locke felt at times like an elaborate drama school experiment?

Locke was at least an 84 minute film. Marion and Geoff ran for two whole series. It was marketed as a comedy. In fact with retrospect the strangest thing about the series is how such a melancholic sitcom was ever commissioned by the BBC in the first place.

But where The Office and Marion and Geoff both simply use some elements of tragicomedy, Withnail and I is carved out from in its rich history and made of the same ingredients.

The script is, in essence, prose poetry. It is not just that the main players in Withnail and I are themselves steeped in acerbic intelligence and acidic sophistication. It is that the very language which they speak is deeply indebted to this Hall of Fame of English Literature. It is very obvious that Bruce Robinson, its writer and director, is well versed enough in this prestigious history to not just borrow from these giants, but in fact to channel their spirits.

Withnail and I is in fact a 3 Act play, disguised as a film, and its characters are often really just modern incarnations of traditional characters in the tragicomic tradition (“Danny the Dealer” for example is the “wise fool”, with more wisdom in his pothead philosophy than those who look down on him).

Accordingly the initial critical and commercial reaction to the film was a muted one.

Most people hated it.

Unemployment, alcoholism and professional failure.

It is not much of a pitch for funding for a comedy film, is it?

Of those who are part of the “cult” of Withnail today, it is undoubtedly true that some view his aristocratic spin on the live fast, die young mantra of the Rock and Roll aesthetic as heroic, which further exemplifies the mismatch of tragicomedy action and viewer reaction.

When they play the Withnail and I drinking “game”, (which essentially entails attempting to drink the same liver eviscerating catalogue of booze which he consumes during the film), do they fully understand the irony of deriving fun from attempting to emulate the Herculean drinking capacity of the film’s title character who, the film strongly implies, is drinking himself into an early grave?

withnail-and-i-drinking-game

Not Much Of A Plot:

Withnail and I tells the semi-autobiographical tale of two struggling, unemployed actors living in squalid conditions in London in 1969 who survive on a diet of alcohol and drugs. Deciding that a change of scenery is needed, they take a holiday in the Penrith cottage owned by Withnail’s uncle Monty, which does not quite to plan.

The script was adapted from an unpublished novel by Robinson, which was based on his own experience. “I” was Robinson. Withnail was based upon his one time housemate, Vivian MacKerrell.

Who was Vivian MacKerrell?

Until a few years ago, his Wikipedia page referred to him in circular fashion, only as a little known actor who died young. But the Withnail cult would not relent, and after much investigation, a more colourful description of the man has been tendered.

Fellow house mate and actor Michael Feast, apparently described MacKerrell as a "Splenetic wastrel of a fop", whilst Robinson has said he was a "Jack of all but a master of none", declaring himself a great actor but doing nothing to prove this.

The Grant Of A Lifetime:

If by all accounts he was a larger than life character, Richard E Grant exceeds all expectations by delivering a genuine tour de force, bringing Withnail to life in a way which according to none other than Roger Ebert himself makes him “one of the most iconic figures in modern films.”

Rather than just pitching the performance for laughs, Grant seethes and sloshes with complete contempt for all others around him. Withnail is a cowardly and morally irresponsible alcoholic of seismic order. But he is also poisonous and clinical when taking aim with the roll of his tongue.

Grant was apparently compelled by Robinson to lose weight for the film – in a bid to somehow capture the film’s keen aesthetic of failure and Grungey penury. The mise-en-scene is completed by his “costume” - a cascading, lived in tweed coat, with long 19th century riding coat-tails, a rolled up collarless 1930s white shirt, a flamboyant cravat and a dandy Edwardian waistcoat all point to Withnail’s class displacement – here is a man of noble lineage who had long ago rejected it.

However the footwork is really done in Grant’s maniacal facial expressions and boozed out dead end stares. Though never what most would call unattractive, when utilising the right angle and the right expression Grant (much like Rob Brydon) is in possession of the most tragic face.

But as the first rule of the elegantly wasted aesthetic requires, even when he looks tragic, he looks fantastic.

It is an ironic and revealing indictment of the fashion industry, that Withnail proved to be a huge influence on British fashion in the 1990s.

Richard E Grant’s performance is unquestionably his greatest by an entire galaxy, and unfortunately the only performance which will ever link his name to greatness. Some would say his career was affected by spending the rest of his career trying to avoid being typecast in a bid for artistic integrity (although I would rebut this argument by pointing to those Argos adverts).

I would simply say that he has always been a one note actor, but point to his performance as evidence that even when a one note actor hits that note properly, he can still deliver spectacularly (Rocky 1, anyone?).

I did read many years after falling in love with the film that his baby daughter died during filming, which is interesting to say the least. It is clear that Withnail’s own larger than life flamboyance is little else than the flip side to his suicidal pessimism, although the film does not explain how he came to be this way. But could the fact that Grant’s 6 month old daughter died during the making of the film explain how he was so able to portray the manic wit and morbid pessimism of the character? Grant has never spoken much about the real life tragedy and out of respect nobody has ever put this question to him. Either way, it does always strike me that his performance would in a parallel universe have met with boundless recognition – it was Oscar worthy but unfortunately upon release the film was largely unseen.

Paul McGann similarly delivers a career peak in an understated performance which skilfully navigates the terrain around straight-man territory to settle in as sensitive foil. Richard Griffiths threatens to steal the show playing (quite literally) a rampant homosexual with a thirst for cock the like of which has never since been seen. But as far as the acting is concerned, this will always be Grant’s film.

The Tragedy With Withnail:

At one level, I would strongly argue that Withnail is a film about the decay of the British aristocratic class. What makes Withnail a relic of the past is not in fact his age (as is the case with Uncle Monty) but his soul.

Withnail is the type of quintessentially British fucker/figure of history with enough money to never have to worry about real life problems, about settling down and finding gainful employment, about paying the bills and buying a new house. So he can (quite literally) afford to remain anti-establishment, rebellious and idle.

He is a product of a country which ruled the world until the turn of the previous century, and was then one of the world’s richest countries in the rest of it.

When I was at university around 10 years ago, I did in fact meet a few students who had distantly inherited some of these “zero regard for evolution” aristocratic genes, and I can tell you, they are if nothing else, a real hoot.

I think in particular of my friend Rupert, a Marlborough House boy, who would take me to the pub before classes. When I asked him why he drank so heavily in between tutorials, he told me that he just found it made the classes “go down” more easily, and that he was too wealthy to worry about failure in any event.

Unlike the rest of us mere mortals, the privileged status of the British aristocracy leaves enough space in their brains to allow them to develop an entire language of razor sharp put downs and sneering verbal hidings, which they can deliver at will in the right circumstances.

Yet time and time again the peculiar brand of drunken aristocratic eccentricity which Withnail’s character makes reference to, becomes a codeword for directionless depression – in defiance of and perhaps in consequence of the profound spiritual and cultural disconnection between this tiny elite of people and the remainder of British society.

However there is no doubt in my mind that people of that particular breed have almost disappeared from our shores.

Or perhaps rather they mutated. Think of an Alexander Armstrong or a Hugh Dennis. Think even of a Boris Johnson, and you may understand where that lineage branches into today – a sort of slightly offbeat, posh but eccentric character perhaps – but no longer entirely remote. In fact they are more prone today to be unlikely advocates of liberal causes.

Why?

Because the aristocratic class in the UK are now an endangered species. Majority rules. Today few people will stand and defend the place of the House of Lords as the upper house of Parliament as a rightful one. We no longer believe in the divine right of kings. Today we still have the descendants of the aristocratic class in the UK - yes. But they are no longer aristocratic.

They had to wisen up, adapt and evolve in order to survive, by abandoning the antediluvian in favour of the cosmopolitan, and by entering the world of law and business, as opposed to ruling it.

Withail and I is made in 1987 but set in 1969, at a time when it was still just about possible to meet a member of the British Victorian landed gentry. If you travelled into pockets of the Home Counties which had as yet been untouched by Western Liberal Multiculturalism, you could still find the mad as a brush alcoholic oddball aristocrat rebel which Withnail represents. But today, the social and professional integration which necessity triggered means that characters like Withnail no longer really exist.

An interesting fact about this angle is that of Richard E Grant himself. Born of wealthy colonial settlers in Swaziland, of English, Dutch and German descent, he himself is very much a relic of a bygone age, and has commented on how he used the fact that he spoke a brand of Queen's English not really heard since the 1950s to his advantage as an actor.

So, is it possible to view the tragicomic underbelly of Withnail and I as a portrayal of the pending extinction of the British upper class?

The answer to this must account for the fact that Robinson himself is no aristocrat. The film’s handling of the issue in fact remains very neutral. Uncle Monty himself acknowledges that he represents the tail end of Edwardian Britain, but it is unclear whether this is something which is supposed to illicit our sympathy.

There are other running themes in Withnail and I that are worthy of consideration. Town vs Country is an obvious one.

Another is the death of the Western youthful idealism of the 1960s. Withnail and I documents the fact that this was not purely an American cultural phenomenon, and amongst certain people in British High Society, these ideas also gained traction before being disposed of in the name of pragmatism.

Ultimately the question as to what is the central tragedy in Withnail and I is inextricably tied up with how it reveals itself.

You see for almost 100 minutes Withnail and I is as raucous, freewheeling, wild and over the top as Withnail himself is. It is a buddy film of the most entertaining order. At times it is genuinely dramatic, at other times it is suspenseful even. And unlike Marion and Geoff, it is loaded with genuine laugh out loud moments.

The production process of Withnail and I was chaotic. Filming was almost shut down after 3 days when the production company representative Denis O’Brien of Handmade Films decided it was “as funny as cancer” and badly lit.

This chaotic journey which the filmmaking made seems to feed into the drug addled debauchery of the film’s plot. Even the low production values and lighting only seem to add to the film’s morose undertones.

But rather than having to balance the tragic and comic dimensions of the film, Bruce Robinson wisely makes the tragedy bottom heavy. He allows you to fully enjoy the party, but then what makes the film tragic is the very late realisation that the party has come to an end, and where “I” will go onto enjoy a bright new future, Withnail himself will remain stuck in the past.

What presents itself as a buddy movie to be enjoyed by middle class students seeking cheap thrills reveals itself to actually have been a cover; this is a film about the death of friendships, not about their continuation. What we thought was an unashamed celebration of the glory of wasted youth ruthlessly and rapidly uncovers itself as a health warning about the heavy toll of non-comformity and never growing up.

Bruce Robinson’s unpublished novel and original script ends with Withnail shooting his own head off.

Mercifully Robinson decided that such an ending would be too dark a way to conclude proceedings and the film is able to achieve a multilayered and psychologically nuanced note of bone chilling transcendence as Withnail delivers an impassioned performance of the “What A Piece of Work Is Man” monologue from Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the freezing rain in Regents Park (absurdly) to an audience of uncomprehending wolves, before walking off into the gloomy distance, holding a bottle of wine in hand.

"I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth. And indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory. This most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! How like an angel in apprehension. How like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me, no, nor woman neither. Nor woman neither."

This monologue, spoken in the play by Prince Hamlet to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Act II, Scene 2, represents at one level a meeting of performer and his subject, as it reveals Hamlet’s depressive state of mind and loss of faith in humanity following the death of his father, which Withnail mirrors.

It is also interesting in a film which channels so much from British literary history that Withnail seems only to reveal his true feelings when he is acting the lines of a Shakespearean play (a running motif itself in Elizabethan drama).

At another level, it delivers the most piercing punchline in the entire film, as well as its cruellest.

The tragedy at the end of Withnail does not emanate solely from the fact that it is (or rather was) every young thespian’s ambition to play Hamlet but that we know that Withnail will never fulfil this dream – being trapped as he is in the alcoholic clock of pronouncing himself to be the world’s greatest living actor by day, and collapsing into a drunken, unemployed piss stained heap by night.

The tragedy is also a consequence of the “it’s all too late” revelation that Withnail, in spite of his comic book pomposity, was in fact genuinely very talented all along. We had just never been given the opportunity to see it until the end credits (pun very much intended) began to roll.

As he waltzes away from the camera into a Beckett-esque dreary rainy tableau of failure, it is clear that Withnail is not just turning his back on us, but on life itself. The sad clown overtones of the accompanying piece of music “Withnail’s Theme”, written by David Dundas & Rick Wentworth, further implant the film’s ending in the tragicomic tradition, and make a mockery of how Jimi Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower" was employed to create an intimate road movie aesthetic.

An interesting question which must surely follow from a consideration of the demographics of the cult of Withnail is whether its popularity amongst a middle class, artsy and creative crowd owes to the film tapping into their own status anxiety about the success of their own creative endeavours.

Are we Withnail or “I”?

After all, it is likely that we all know a Withnail. Perhaps a Withnail is writing this very article.

However, even if there is a modicum of truth in this theory, we can draw from an invaluable lesson by the ever brilliant Alain de Botton in his excellent book “Status Anxiety”. de Botton discusses the bare bones of works of Western “Tragedy” , concluding that these works always handle the loss of status of their protagonists in a very sympathetic way, which enables us to accord a level of respect to them, because of their humanity, regardless of their failures.

de Botton in fact uses Hamlet itself as an example, when he states that it would be odd for an audience to leave a production of Hamlet commenting that Hamlet is such a “loser”, even though it is clear that Hamlet has lost.

The same is true of Withnail and I. I do not know many fans of the film who would describe Withnail as a loser, despite the fact that the film’s ending does make clear that he has lost in the game of life. Withnail’s future might look decidedly bleak – but then we understand that life is bleak sometimes, and Withnail is simply far too witty and vitriolic to ever be considered one of life’s victims.

If Withnail and I makes for uncomfortable viewing for some, that is because it is self knowingly mining a rich British tradition of self-destructive eccentricity – where eccentricity ultimately becomes a code word for depression. Ultimately this will always illicit a very divisive response from the viewer.

Withnail and I: The Greatest British Film Ever Made

However even in this age of “ tactical necessity” (to use Withnail’s own words), I feel that I must put my money where my mouth is and declare Withnail and I to be the greatest British film ever made.

There. I have said it.

Withnail and I is the greatest ever British film perhaps because it is the most British.

It has taken in and absorbed the same rain sodden miserablism dripping from Beckett, Stoppard and Pinter. In 2016 as the celebration of stupidity in white trash culture which ravaged American culture sweeps too over Britain, as is evidenced by TOWIE and Big Brother, Withnail and I is one film which connects us with what made Britain Great in the first place.

It is a tragedy of sorts that the ever reclusive Bruce Robinson was only able to make one flat out masterpiece and is unlikely to ever repeat it. The talented cast of Grant, McGann and Griffiths sadly arguably never scaled creative peaks like this one again either. Griffiths is now dead. Grant and McGann are both approaching 60. Bruce Robinson is already 70, and has three further films to his name, none of which were any good.

But as the cult of a film which barely broke even upon release in cinemas 30 years ago steadily grows bigger with each passing year, it would now seem that Withnail and I did in fact have the last laugh, even if Withnail himself was eventually found dead face down in a pricey puddle of merlot based claret, which he stole from Uncle Monty’s cellar.