Cinema Magazine – March, 1996

Names – that’s what Goethe already told us about 200 years ago – are “sound and smoke”.  Let’s for instance take T.C. Boyle, E.M. Forster, T.S. Elliot – or J.R. Ewing. Who on earth knows what those initials stand for.………and what about Richard E. Grant?

A British journalist once claimed, the shortcut in his name would stand for “excess”. And indeed: A look at his previous roles shows that this idea isn’t as absurd as it looks on first sight. In “Withnail and I” Richard E. Grant plays a manic alcohol-addict, in “How To Get Ahead in Advertising” a schizo advertising-pro whose life is being controlled by a speaking furuncle and in “Warlock” he travelled through the centuries as a witch-hunter.

Also pretty bizarre are the memories of the now 39 year old of his first cinema-experience. ‘I was about 7 years old and remember that there was an American car in that movie, which drowned in some swamp. That really impressed me.’ So the son of a Minister who was born in Mbabane, Swaziland decided to become an actor. Years later he founded the multi-racial “Troupe Theater Company” with several schoolmates. ‘In South Africa,’ Richard E. Grant remembers, ‘there was just one place where black and white people were able to come together without getting in trouble and to swap ideas: the theater.’

Today the actor who likes to compare his own face to a tombstone, is one of the most successful actors for supporting roles in Hollywood. He filmed with Scorsese (“Age of Innocence”), and Altman (“The Player”), but was most impressed by Francis Ford Coppola. ‘After all he risked marriage and money to shoot “Apocalypse Now”.’   One time, Richard E. Grant had enough of all the excesses: ‘The shooting of “Hudson Hawk” was hell. Each morning the same drama: While everyone else appeared on the set well prepared, Bruce Willis had re-written the script overnight.’

Recently, Grant played a wonderfully snobbish fashion designer in Altman’s “Pret-a-porter”, a lovely ironic gay-satire. Just to say goodbye to extreme characters shortly afterwards, in “Jack & Sarah” he plays a tragic-comical widower, who – despite all troubles – learns to live his life. ‘This role’, Grant is pleased, ‘finally offered me the chance to play someone who’s not a megalomaniac, mentally ill or a drug addict.’

Should there be a totally unspectacular explanation for the shortcut in the end? ‘The E’, he explains with an ironic smile, ‘means nothing. I just didn’t want to get mixed up with the American actor Richard Grant. So I simply made up the initial.

Click here to see the original article (in German).

10 years since it was made, Withnail & I has redefined the words “Cult following”. With its infinite amount of quotable lines, it has inspired a generation of drop-outs and one very popular drinking game. David Cavanagh, the world’s biggest Withnail fan, talks to those responsible for the film to ascertain why……

Over the noise of the traffic in Soho’s Frith Street, two men in the upstairs bar of the Dog And Duck are shouting out of an open window.

“Fork it!”

“FORK it!”

The words, which will be familiar to fans of Withnail & I, are particularly meaningful. It was Richard E Grant’s delivery of these very words – at a casting session in Kensington back in 1986 – that convinced writer-director Bruce Robinson that he had found his Withnail. That was a pretty good day.

“Fork it!” shouts Grant, bug-eyed.

“FORK IT!” Robinson yells.

MGM Haymarket. A Saturday night. Two girls filing out of Leaving Las Vegas – and they’re laughing for a start, which can’t be right – notice one of the new posters for Withnail & I as they descend the stairs.

“Oh, I’ve heard of that,” says one to the other. “It’s supposed to be really good.”

“I’ve heard it’s quite funny.”

Eavesdropping on this, the Withnail lover experiences mixed feelings. On the one hand, as a film fan and a nice guy, he is pleased that one of his favourite British movies still commands a powerful word-of-mouth reputation nearly ten years after it was made. He applauds the girls’ open-minded reaction to the film and hopes that they will go and see it.

One the other hand, being an essentially hostile and mean-spirited person, he believes that all prospective converts should be discouraged, as Withnail And I is not a film to be seen by anyone who is not intense or highly intelligent, or who thinks Leaving Las Vegas is a comedy. Then again, he is suspicious of the Withnail cult – he has a lifelong aversion to groups of two or more people who recite movie dialogue in unison – and he believes that the film’s reputation needs rescuing from those who think it’s just an excuse for a drinking game. Having said that, he sees nothing wrong with drinking games in principle, and considers the drinking scenes in withnail to be some of the finest ever filmed.

So what does he do? Stay away, he hisses as he descends the stairs behind the two girls. Stay away from Withnail….

“I think one of the reasons why it’s so popular is it’s one of those films that people find on video through recommendation,” says Ralph Brown, who played Danny. “Somebody says, ‘Oh, you must see this.’ And they watch it and enjoy it and they almost feel like it’s theirs. It’s like a little secret film. I hope that’s not all going to disappear now….”

The Cult Of Withnail And I. It sounds like it ought to be a film in its own right, like The Making Of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Instead, it is a phenomenon that has slow burned its way across the world. it has made heroes out of the film’s actors. It has spawned a mysterious sect of young men in long coats and scarves, who “feel unusual” and attack their washing-up with forks. It has lured car-loads to Penrith to demand “cake and fine wine” of elderly women in tea-rooms. it has rivalled “This Is Spinal Tap” for sheer tonnage of dialogue-memorising among the addicted. And it has popularised a surname, Withnail, that cannot be found in any phone book.

Nine years after it was first screened, Withnail’s crazy afterlife continues and nobody knows how to stop it. A cinematic re-release has been secured and a competition arranged with Oddbins off-licenses. (“Bring me the finest wines known to humanity…” you are supposed to cry, and they then call the police or something.) Withnail And I posters adorn Oddbins foyers as we speak. The first prize in the competition is a weekend in Penrith, the winner to crash in the actual hotel where Withnail said, “Right, we’re going to have to work quickly. A pair of quadruple whiskies and another pair of pints, please.” Such history. Such devotion.

Upon entering the upstairs bar of the Dog And Duck – a pint of bitter in his hand, a cigarette jammed in his mouth – Bruce Robinson examines the Withnail/Oddbins poster and pronounces the whole procedure rather strange.

Getting Robinson down to London to discuss Withnail is hard enough. Getting him to be serious about it is next to impossible. A skinny, handsome 49-year-old, he has been compared facially to a rock star. An enigmatic man, he seeks to distance himself from any dignity-jeopardising, mad scramble to corral noisy new generations into the Withnail cult. He wonders aloud – as he will do many times today – why all this fuss is being made, why anyone should still be interested in his crazy little low-budget film from so long ago.

(Richard E Grant roars with laughter every time Robinson affects bewilderment. “He told me two weeks into it,” Grant insists, “he said, ‘Grant, we’re making a fucking masterpiece,'” “That’s a load of cobblers,” Robinson retorts.)

Whatever the truth, Robinson is a real character. Knocking back glass after glass of red wine, profaning without regard for slander laws or political correctness, coughing his guts up with each puff of his cigarette, he reduces Grant to helpless laughter time after time. his speech may have a little of Withnail’s aristocratic timbre, but it has every bit of the spleen, the wit and the often mesmerising facility with language. After an especially turbulent cough, he says this, in perfectly-paced Withnail-ese: “From my children I’ve acquired a bit of flu.”

“You sound as it you’re dying,” Grant tells him.

“Why?” he replies. “A little bit of lung cancer, what’s wrong with that?”

“You sound like those two old men on the Muppets balcony.”

“There’s definitely something in there,” Robinson agrees, tapping his throat.

“Some sort of mollusk. But I was reading on the train about that Mitford brother. Sackville-West or whatever his name is. He’s 94, still writing and he’s smoked 60 a day for 80 years. It quite cheered me up.”

And here he is, fulminating fogeyishly on the enduring phenomenon of Withnail copycat behaviour:

“it’s men that like Withnail And I, isn’t it? Young homos. I have seen them! I have seen them! I was coming down the motor way not so long ago, with my wife – sedately driving a Range Rover, as a matter of fact – and we get stuck in a traffic jam. And coming towards us is a Jag with about five Withnails in it. They didn’t realise that you can’t all be Withnail. Buzz!

(Electronically lowering window, leaning out crossly) ‘You’re not all Withnails!’ But they were all Withnails. Of course, if they’d been real withnails, they would have been drunk. the driver was clearly sober.”

The first time Robinson and Grant met was at the aforementioned casting session in 1986. Paul McGann was there, too. He had already been hired as the “I” character (referred to as Marwood in the script but unnamed in the film). The Withnail And I script had built up its own reputation by the time it fell into the hands of the 26-year-old McGann.

“What do they say in literacy circles? It fell like a meteor into a fairground, or something. As soon as it appeared, everyone was going, ‘Have you heard about it?’ Everybody wanted to get down there,” he says, speaking from Vancouver where he is filming Dr Who.

As most Withnail fans now appreciate, the screenplay was based on a novel Robinson had written in 1970 (aged 24) about two drunken, luckless actors.

It was semi-autobiographical: in the 60s, he had shared a terrible Camden Town abode with a self-destructively hard-drinking, inspirational actor friend called Vivian MacKerrell. A good deal of Withnail’s snorting, upper class swagger had been based on MacKerrell, and the 28-year-old Grant was told of this.

“Did he ever get any work as an actor?” Grant asks Robinson now. “That’s the question I’m always asked.”

“Infrequently,” Robinson drawls.

(Mackerrell died of cancer in 1995. Robinson dedicates the new edition of the book of the screenplay to him.)

His novel had set Robinson on the road to screenplay writing. This he did for most of the 70s and 80s. After many disappointments (to this day, only five of his 38 completed scripts have made it to the screen) he wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay for The Killing Fields in 1984. “It was eminently distressing not getting the Oscar,” he admits.

“Particularly losing it to such a fucking awful film as that Hamlet.” (He means Amadeus) Richard E Grant knew quite a lot about Bruce Robinson. Indeed, as a student in Cape Town in the late 1970s, Grant had stared at Robinson’s face every time he went to the toilet. His (female) flat mate had seen Robinson act opposite Isabelle Adjani in Truffaut’s The Story Of Adele H., and become obsessed by the Englishman’s good looks. She therefore installed a photograph of him in the bathroom. Grant himself saw the majority of Robinson’s 12 films (1968-75). Years later, spotting the name “Bruce Robinson” on the screenplay for Withnail And I, Grant assumed the two men could not be connected. They were.

Robinson was impressed by Grant’s audition – McGann was less sure – and gave him the role on the understanding that he lost weight. Robinson: “I said to the casting director, Mary Selway, I said I’m looking for Byron, not a fucking fat young Dirk Bogarde, which is what his publicity still looked like. (Adopts camp voice) He went on a strict diet, didn’t you? Some kind of protein drink you had, if I remember.”

The two lead actors began a week of intensive rehearsals together at Shepperton Studios. Neither had made a film before. The burden of this one was truly on them. And it was one of the most peculiar comedies either had ever read.

“The thing is,” says McGann now, “when you know it’s meant to be funny, you try and make it funny. And then it’s horrible. So that was the problem, stylistically, for anyone who’s interested.”

“When I first read for him on that first day,” recalls Grant, “he said, ‘Cut the Noel Coward, dear, and start again.’ Because the lines were so epigrammatic, I thought maybe it had to be in that style. “Robinson interjects earnestly.

“All it needs to get the laughs is total honesty. Total belief. If the casting had got fucked up, we’d have failed with the film. it’s so on-the-line. Go too far one way – or too little – and it wouldn’t have worked.”

Once the problem of Grant’s allergy to alcohol had been dealt with – by getting him drunk on vodka and champagne on an all-night bender which, according to McGann, “would outsell Police Stop if it had been filmed” – shooting began on location in Penrith. The producers, Handmade Films, took a solicitous interest in the first day’s rushes, which were necessarily dark (Withnail And “I” arrive by night, enter Uncle Monty’s cottage, light the lamp) and not funny. Over-running by lunchtime on the first day, Robinson was told to cut the bull scene from the film. He resigned instead. Grant was mortified.

“They were just being a gang of cunts fro the first couple of weeks,” shrugs Robinson. “They wanted Uncle Monty to be an effeminate old homo. Fucking nightmare.”

“I’d been telling people I was in this film,” explains Grant. “You first have to get around the title, because they don’t know what it means. “Robinson: “You should try it in Thailand. Witnoh. Witnoh And I.”

Grant: “And then you tell people, it has no plot, no women, nobody gets fucked – there’s an attempted one – and it’s two blokes who are arseholed at the end of the 60s. And people look at you as if you’re some pathetic, desperate case.”

“I’ll tell you exactly why there are no women in it,” Robinson announces.

“If you’re in a state of extreme poverty when you’re young, you literally can’t afford girlfriends. I wanted to use that, in a subliminal way, as a facet of the deprivation. There is no femininity in their lives at all. And indeed in that period of my life, there weren’t any women. I couldn’t afford them.”

“I thought you were with Lesley Ann Down at this point of your extreme deprivation,” interjects Grant.

“I wasn’t with Lesley until 1972. There wasn’t much time for women because it was very much an up-all-night, blokes-talking-and-drinking lifestyle, and girls don’t like that. I remember this friend of mine scored with a chick one night. He washed his sheets literally twice a year. And he got this fucking tube of Mum Rolette that he went over the sheets to get this girl into bed. Because they could not have thrashed into supplication on the banks of the Ganges, these bastards, I tell you.”

Panic over, Robinson returned, as did the scene with the bull. Thereafter – and it’s a curious fact – neither Robinson nor Grant remember there being much laughter on set. You’d expect huge amounts of corpsing, but no, McGann remembers Robinson being very superstitious; if the crew laughed, he’d re-think the scene and start again.

Of all the actors, Grant recalls Richard Griffiths being the only giggler.

“There was only one day that Robinson laughed,” Grant says. “It was a scene in a pub – it wasn’t rehearsed – and I had put a bun or something in my mouth. McGann comes back after the guy’s said, ‘Perfumed ponce.’ And I turned round with a piece of pastry stuck in my mouth, and he (Robinson) literally fell about lighting, and I didn’t know why.”

Grant’s major laughing scene – and one which can be seen in the finished film – came in the Penrith tea-room scene. Robinson had filled the place with elderly local people, without telling them what was going to happen. The atmosphere was interesting, made more so by two dogs situated behind Grant’s chair, who breathed hoarsely and arrhythmically as he spoke. When he reached the line: “And we’ll install a fucking jukebox in here….” he dissolved in laughter.

“Robinson comes over,” recalls McGann, “and says, ‘Great, boys, great, but one thing, Richard, when you get to that line, don’t laugh. ‘Oh, Okay.’ So we did it again and he laughed again. And a third time, and it was getting worse. By 12, 13, 14, Robinson’s livid and Richard’s almost in tears: ‘I’m really sorry, I’m so unprofessional.’ We were going like, ‘Think of your mother dying.'”

“Do you know,” says Robinson suddenly, “I haven’t seen the film for years….”

“Yes you have, you fucking liar!” Grant shouts, outraged. “You watch it once a week!”

One aspect of the script that proved uncannily true to life was the relationship in the film’s last 20 minutes between Withnail and “I”. It mirrored that of Grant and McGann. The scene in the cottage when “I” receives the telegram – and Withnail offers his thin-lipped congratulations – was played from the heart by Grant, who dreaded a return to unemployment when shooting ended, and envied McGann his television success with The Monocled Mutineer.

“You and Paul didn’t get on very well, did you?” Robinson taunts Grant. “I always had a scene of a fission between you. Particularly the night he crashed the car and you got out and said, ‘I’m not being in this scene with a fucking drunk!’ And slammed the car door.”

“I can’t believe you’ve remembered that,” sighs Grant, head in hands.

“That was the arrival at Uncle Monty’s house in the Jaguar,” Robinson goes on, enjoying himself. “Paul had had a few that night. He had to reverse back for another take he ran into something. Grant got out like Merle Oberon, slamming the door with his coat flying.”

“He has my phone number,” says Grant patiently. “I have his. I have seen him. We have eaten meals together. So this Cold War you’re insinuating isn’t true.”

“I’m surprised he didn’t remember the day we were shooting up in Kensal Rise,” McGann says later. “It was the drive out of London, that scene where Richard shouts: ‘Scrubbers!’ We hadn’t really got permission to film and on the fourth take, just as we get to where the crew are, the traffic lights go red. We’re there sitting in this Jag for a minute. And I can see across the road there’s this Panda car. It’s Sunday morning, there’s no one around. I can see the fellow nudge his mate, mouthing, ‘What the fuck is that?’ And I thought, ‘Bollocks,’ and I stood on it and we took off through this red light. And they chased us. And Grant is screaming. He’s screaming in my ear, he’s babbling, he’s talking about being deported back to Swaziland. I’m going, ‘Shut up! Shut up!’ And we get back round to where the crew are – I’m on the pavement doing about 60 – and before I’ve even brought it to a stop, the passenger door is open and Grant’s running for his life. Disappeared down the street. They found him in someone’s garden.”

Down a late afternoon telephone line, the actor who played Danny is thinking back fondly to the three days in 1986 he spent on Withnail And I. “It’s one of the few films I’ve done that I can actually watch and enjoy,” says Ralph Brown. “It still delights me, I’m happy to say. There are lines in it which I enjoy as much as any other fan.”

“Danny didn’t exist,” explains Robinson, “although I did know a drug-dealer called Danny, who’s now a metals dealer in the Stock Exchange. He used to come round at three in the morning. People would lean out of the window to complain and he’s say, ‘Shut your ‘ole!'”

“Danny was a familiar character to me,” admits Ralph Brown. “I come from Lewes in East Sussex and I was a teenager there in the 70s. It was a hippie rocker town. Although I was kind of into Bryan Ferry and David Bowie, a lot of the guys in town had extremely long hair and played in bands and got stoned every night. One particular guy called Noddy used to roll these incredibly long, two-foot spliffs at parties while the younger kinds gathered round and paid homage.”

“I got the voice for him from a hairdresser at Pinewood,” says Robinson. “She was the dumbest bitch you’ve ever met. “I was sitting in on the auditions for Withnails and Dannys when Ralph came in,” laughs McGann. “He was this very soft-spoken, doe-eyed fellow. Bruce said, ‘That’s him!’ I was like, Are you sure, Bruce? In the end they stuck a wig on him and he became Mr Sibilant Brain-Bombed.”

“He’s a very good actor, Ralph,” allows Robinson. “But he’s so unlike the character. He’s quite straight. he’s a bit of a spiv, actually. He used to have an old Vauxhall.”

More hassles with Handmade ensue. They wouldn’t let Robinson shoot the drive back from Penrith to London (this was a disaster: two separate scenes had earlier set up the magnificent piss-bottle payoff) and Robinson was being told to stump up £50,000 per second for using Jimi Hendrix’s Voodoo Child on the soundtrack. McGann believes Robinson paid for this scene out of his own pocket, and also the one that precedes it in the film, where Withnail finishes his lunch in the car. That was shot on the lawn at shopper at a cost, McGann thinks, of £32,000.

“I’ve never known a tenser day,” he says. “That was the worst day on the film.”

That wasn’t all. Once completed, the film was shown to a small, hand-picked audience in the West End so that Handmade could gauge reactions and conduct on-the-spot, Withnail-related market research, e.g: “the scarf – too long?”

Things did not go well.

“Not a fucking titter,” reports McGann, who heard about it later from Robinson. “Bruce is sitting there and he’s dying. No reaction. Uncle Monty appears? Nothing. It’s a morgue. Bruce said it was like The fucking producers.”

According to McGann, events took an upturn when it was discovered that the audience had been composed of non-English-speaking German tourists staying at a nearby hostel.

There is very little unseen Withnail. There was one scene that Robinson filmed that never made it to the screen: a fencing duel in the cottage between Withnail and “I”. McGann, who still has some of the stills, declares it a classic. Grant is smoking beneath his facing mask.

“All you could see was smoke coming out of the bottom of the mask,” McGann laughs. “And he’s, like, flapping about doing this wanky, drama school fencing. it was hysterical.”

Of course scenes Robinson wrote but never filmed, easily the most notorious was his original ending. As he explains, it went like this: “I” packs his things and heads off to the station. Withnail doesn’t accompany him through Regent’s Park. Instead he takes the shotgun which he has brought back from Monty’s cottage, fills both barrels with a 1953 Margot, says, “Chin chin”, drinks from both barrels and pulls the trigger. The plan was to have his death in freeze frame.

“A little too morbid,” Robinson thinks now. It’s tempting to imagine a different life-story for Withnail And I had that ending been the one. Would it have seemed too bleak? would Grant have won a BAFTA? And can any ending really be sadder, anyway, than a rotten actor delivering a rainy soliloquy to an unreceptive wolf?

“That line (of Danny’s), ‘They’ll be going round this town shouting, “Bring out your dead”‘, Robinson notes. “Withnail was one of the dead. The symbolism of the very short haircut, at the end, of the “I” character was based on the horror of Thatcherism coming along.”

Faced with that horror, almost everyone in the film is one of the dead. Certainly, the two most dissimilar characters in the film share a bleak, pragmatic world view that varies only in the phrasing of it. There’s poor, tragic Monty, for whom a golden age has ended. And there’s Danny, who final line reverberates quite menacingly: “And as Presuming Ed here has so consistently pointed out,” he concludes, passing on the Camberwell Carrot, “we have failed to paint it black.”

“That’s true, actually,” Robinson says thoughtfully. “That would have been an interesting scene to have written – between Monty and Danny.” “Not that interesting,” sulks Grant. “I wouldn’t have been in it.”

The badinage is now fast-paced and growing increasingly comical and bitchy. Grant voices the prophecy that Robinson is about to peg out any minute from overdoing the drink and fags. (“Oy-oy-oy,” he shudders as Robinson unleashes the afternoon’s worst cough.) Robinson – regularly switching back and forth between his own voice and that of a preening Soho ponce – rejoins that Grant is nothing but a Hollywood tart, an ungrateful prima donna and, worse, an unfit parent. Grant next reveals that he has written an anecdote in his imminent memoirs about Robinson masturbating into a copy of the Daily Telegraph. (Amazingly, this turns out to be a true story; Robinson vows he’ll sue if it isn’t in the book.) Robinson observes that Grant’s hairline is receding and he will shortly be requiring a wig.

As the discussion creeps closer to Derek and Clive Terrian, Robinson attempts to sum up what it is about Grant that made him perfect for Withnail.

“I don’t know why this is,” he reflects, tussling with a dangerously full glass of red wine, “but somehow the voice I have in mind in my head when I’m writing – this awful, fuck-up,quasi-homo bounder; this vituperative, nasty, acid git (Grant laughs throughout this) – somehow, 7,000 miles away in Africa, Richard can articulate it as an actor. I don’t know why. But he can. He really knows how to hit those moments of spleen.”

“God, that’s going to sound so pretentious,” sighs Grant. How much of Withnail has seeped into Grant’s own personality?

“I’m going to answer that question,” decides Robinson. “I don’t think it’s seeped into him. What it has done is release the latentness of it that was already there, i.e. he’s allowed to exploit it.” He contemplates Richard E for one moment or two. “You’re definitely more Withnailesque than you were when I met you.”

“When I was a terrified, Dirk Bogardian porker,” adds Grant.

“What the fuck is this?” Robinson demands, examining his wine. “I’m only used to drinking quality.”

“You’ve shown admirable restraint, I must say.”

“I have, haven’t I? I’ve only put two of these down, rather than my normal four.”

The good news is that Robinson, far from having retired, has written a film for Grant. It will be the long-awaited follow-up to How To get Ahead In Advertising (1989) and he just has to get it back from Paramount, who appear to own it. McGann reckons Robinson will direct again. So does Grant. Does Robinson?

“No, I mean, fuck me, it’s salutary and horrid, isn’t it?” he laughs, “to think that Withnail And I is probably the only thing I’ll do in my life. Isn’t it?”

“Probably, yeah,” sniggers Grant. “Sad….”

Premiere Magazine – February 1996

Nearly ten years after it was made, Withnail & I has grown in stature to become Britain’s most popular cult film and a transatlantic underground phenomenon.

But how did it all come about? All is revealed by director Bruce Robinson, and stars Paul Mcgann and Richard E. Grant. “I frankly find it strange that there is so much interest in the film,” confesses Robinson to Louise Brealey.

Dayglo Dreamers, uppers and downers, public sex, The Summer of Love. The ‘60s, right? But the year is 1969 and for some, all is not well with the decade. A well-spoken foul-mouthed pair of struggling actors decide to take time out from their state of almost total squalor for a soul-revitalising jaunt to the Lake District.

Described as “the best England-in-an-acid-bath comedy since the halcyon days of Ealing” on its release in 1988, Withnail & I began its public life as just another moderately successful low-budget offbeat comedy. But rather than expiring gracefully after exiting the big screen, the film eventually went to video, caught the imagination of a generation on a last fling with irresponsibility, and re-emerged as a cult.

Bruce Robinson’s semi-autobiographical yarn about the dog end of the swinging ‘60s first saw the grime of day in a 1970 Camden hovel not unlike the one inhabited by Withnail and his friend. But it languished in a bottom drawer until 16 years later, when George Harrison’s production company, HandMade Films, stumped up the cash.

To celebrate the film’s imminent re-release this month, Robinson and his stars, Richard E. Grant (Withnail) and Paul McGann (Marwood), tell the story of Withnail & I in their own words and muse on why the film has stood every test time has thrown at it to become, among other things, as important a part of student life as Fuck A Fresher Week and finals.

How did Withnail & I evolve?

Bruce Robinson: I went to drama school in 1964, which was a singularly unpleasant experience for me. By my second year I knew I didn’t want to be an actor, but I wanted to be there because of the people who were also there. [My friends] Mickey, Viv, David and myself wound up living in Camden Town with very, very very little money, but with a lot of exuberance and a lot of youth, and a lot of expectation that we would all become film stars, which of course never happened. The environment started to deteriorate, kind of in parallel to the decade, and all these relationships moved on: people were getting married or getting jobs until there was just me and this other guy, Vivian, living in this house.

I went to a secondary modern school, I had no education. Viv was an extremely educated guy, and so I guess in a way he became like a tutor to me: I was constantly asking him about Gerard Manley Hopkins and Keats and Baudelaire and all that. Then he left. He actually got a job, which was almost miraculous, and I was left alone with no money, no food, a gas oven, one lightbulb and a mattress on the floor. It was the winter of 1969. I was desolate, completely in despair. I was an actor and I couldn’t get a job.

So one day I came back to the flat and it was snowing, and I started weeping and screaming at the floorboards. Begging the God of Equity, or any fucking god, you know, to help me. And then it really made me laugh, the predicament that I was in – I laughed hysterically when I thought about it. and I had this old Olivetti typewriter that I used to try and write poetry on. I sat down and I started writing this story about my predicament, involving me and my friend who had now gone.

How autobiographical is the story?

Robinson: The year before I had been on holiday to the Lake District with another friend. (So the friend that I went with wasn’t Vivian, the friend who was Withnail in my head, if you know what I mean.) But it was very much a work of fiction, I wasn’t going round with a tape recorder saying, “Oh there’s a nice line.” I invented it. I had written lots of stuff before then, but all of it real crap. It was the first time that I really found my voice.

How did the novel develop into a screenplay?

Robinson: The book used to go around, people read it and liked it and made photocopies and passed it on. It was like when Russia was still a Communist country and you couldn’t read Zhivago:” underground”. And every time I tried to make it above ground, I failed singularly. I forgot about it. In 1970, a very old friend of mine [screenwriter] Andrew Birkin [brother of Jane], gave a copy to David Puttman, who commissioned me for the first thing I’d ever been paid for as a writer. It was part of a 13-part comedic TV series. This was on the basis of the Withnail book, which he hated, you know, because it was too degraded I suppose for David. But anyway, he gave me this television thing and paid me 200 quid for it. There was this very rich young guy who worked in the oil industry and I think through a friend he read it and came along and he said this is going to make a great movie, and – it must have been around 1980 – he gave me some money to convert it into a screenplay. And then it dropped dead again for about another six years.

When did HandMade become involved?

Robinson: HandMade got involved because an American producer called Paul Heller, who I’ve known for many years, had read Withnail & I and found it amusing, and said, “Well, why don’t you do it yourself?” And concurrently a friend, David Wimbury, who was later line producer on the English side of the production team, took it into HandMade and said, “You’ve got to make this movie, this is a film you can’t afford not the make.” Meanwhile, my producer friend Paul had gone to a property developer in Washington and got half the money for the picture. And George [Harrison, who co-owned HandMade with Denis O’Brien] read it and was very amused by it. And the next thing I was up the hill with a film unit.

How did you cast the leads?

Robinson: The casting was the slowest part. I nearly fired Paul[McGann] the week before we started shooting because of the Liverpool accent. He wouldn’t dump it. He’s very broad, and it was his parachute, his safety padding, you know? If you’re in trouble, some of the lines are quite hard to say in a natural way, and he’d revert to the ‘Pool. And it freaked me out. But from the moment I saw paul I wanted him to play the part. I really wanted a Home Counties boy. So I phoned up his agent to say I wouldn’t be able to use him, just to really frighten him into line. I honestly think that if it had got to a minute to midnight, I would have still had him. But the combination of his and Danny’s [the drug dealer played by Ralph Brown] accents, I don’t think would have mixed very well.

Paul McGann: He never told me anything about the Liverpool accent, because he knows I would have smacked him and given him a black eye [laughs]. No, he may have pulled me aside at one point, but neither of us had ever done a picture, so we were all feeling around. He said, “You can have this job.” And then it was my invidious task – as it turned out – to sit with the prospective Withnails while they were auditioning. I say that because after a day or two, he sacked me. He said, “What are you doing? You’re crap, it’s like Norman Wisdom.” I was so upset. I said, “You’ve got to audition me again”, so he did the following Monday, and then he gave me the job back again.

Robinson: Thank god I didn’t replace him. He was my first choice, although I saw dozens of actors for both parts. I offered Paul’s part to Ken Branagh and he turned me down. He wanted to play Withnail, and I didn’t want him to do that. I didn’t think he had enough nobility. Marvellous actor that he is, there’s something about Ken that is the antithesis of Byronesque; he looks like a partially cooked doughnut. Richard [E. Grant] looks like a fucking Byron, you know. When I met him and asked him to read there’s a line in the film where they’re trying to do some washing-up and he says “Fork it!” about a rotten boiled egg or something. And he did it perfectly and I thought, if he can do that for one line…

Richard E. Grant: At the time I did [the line “Fork it!”] I was lunging at him. He asked me did I generally attack directors and I said, “Not to my knowledge,” and he said wouldn’t I come back the next day and read, which I did with Paul McGann. Then I was called back on Monday to be told that Paul McGann was no longer in the running, and it was now going to be various other people. So I thought, Fuck, I’m going to be used as a kind of stooge to read with other actors while they’re trying to find a replacement. It’s not unusual for that to happen. And then I read with a whole bunch of different people, and [In The Bleak Midwinter’s] Michael Maloney was the favoured one. On Thursday the producer, Bruce, the casting director, Maloney and myself had lunch. I had been out of work for nine months, so I thought, Oh I’ll order absolutely everything on the menu. But the problem was I was so knotted up about whether I was going to get this part or not that it was sort of like eating dog bones. I assumed the whole thing had been a complete disaster.

Anyway, we got to the tube after walking back together and Maloney said, “Oh hold on, I’ve got to call my agent.” So he called his agent in this rush hour and then said that even if they offered it to him, he didn’t want to do it. At this point my jaw was on the floor waiting to be wheeled up. And I said,”Why are you saying that?” He said, “I think this film is anti-gay, anti-black, and anti-Irish.” The whole casting process from the beginning had been to find two people who would be compatible and work together as a team, so, as far as I was concerned, if he was pulling out that put me completely out of the question.

I went down the escalators in an increasing state of depression and then got home, and started blubbing around the place – I know it sounds pathetic – and told my wife, and thrashed round my house, and she said, “Why don’t you just call?” So I called my agent and he said, “I’ve been trying to get hold of you. There’s something wrong with your phone.” And I said “I don’t believe you.” He said, “Yeah, but I’ve phoned British Telecom and they told me your phone was out of order. I’ve been trying to call you since four o’clock. They want to give the part to you.” By this point I was levitating to the ceiling, jumping on the furniture, screaming, shouting. And then he said, “You have to read with Paul McGann.” And it was deja vu, because the previous Friday he had the part and I didn’t, and now the roles were reversed.

McGann: I had heard about a script that was knocking around in the spring of 1986. Actually my agent heard about it first and she said there’s a script which they want to see you for, and it’s about Whistler and his assistant. And I’m like, Oh that sounds riveting. But at the time there were a few Victorian period drama things. I then get the script. So I had to ring her up, and say, “This is not only not about Whistler, it’s brilliant.” I was reading it on the tube, I’m laughing and people are going, What’s he got there?

I’d had this big TV out that year [The Monocled Mutineer]. And when I went to this audition, I hadn’t even sat down and [Bruce] said, “You’ve got the job.” As is the usual practice, they were doing the casting at more or less the last minute. We were to have ten days’ rehearsal and then shoot the film. We didn’t know what we were doing, so it was all a bit fraught, and he couldn’t find a Withnail for some days. Then Richard came in. Bruce said, “What about the South African one?” And I was like, “No, Bruce” And he said, “No, I’m going to get him back.” Well…I couldn’t see it. There had been a couple in the few days that came close. It was a physical thing [Bruce] was looking for. And [Richard] was very nervous himself – he had that imperious bearing and looked down his nose at you.

What about the rehearsals?

Robinson: Richard was quite porky and a tee-totaller, so a very stringent diet was followed by the only time in his life he’d ever been drunk that did the trick. I kept him up and told him, “You have to drink alcohol.” It was vodka and champagne. He hates alcohol. Never drunk, never smoked. We used to give him these herbal [cigarettes] that made him very ill. But otherwise I just totally disillusioned him in every way I could.

Grant: Bruce wanted me to have this Los Angeles bullshit: a “chemical memory”. For a man who is allergic to drink, it is a lot: a whole bottle of champagne in one night. And the next morning they had set up a bar absolutely stacked with these gallon-sized jars of vodka. So I poured one of those lng tumblers three quarters of the way with vodka and topped it up with Pepsi-Cola, drank it down in one and vomited. Paul and Bruce laughed. I just remember them laughing because I was falling around and crying, and laughing completely out of my head. But because we’d had the script drilled into us so resolutely by Robinson, we managed to stagger through three quarters of the whole film all in one room banging out all the speeches. But then I knew I had to get out of the French windows, so I did and a Persian carpet came out of my mouth.

McGann: My fond belief is that he based his whole performance on this. If you’d have seen the raw material – I don’t know who the Oscar went to that year, but… Bruce was panicking. There’s nothing in the world as bad as a bad drunk act – think how pony it could have been! But now look at his eyes, there’s a scene where he shouts out, “Scrubbers” to a group of schoolgirls. He has that madness in his eyes. It wasn’t him. He dictated the pace, he was the soul. He was fantastic when used well, and basically got what he deserved.

What happened when you got on the set?

Robinson: It’s like playing poker when you don’t know how to do it – I was winning all the time. And subsequent to that I’ve always lost because I know the rules. Every hand we all played on the film was right, It’s curious, because on the night before we started filming, I was naturally a little bit nervous and David Wimbury said to me, “It doesn’t matter how good your script is, how good your crew is, if you don’t get luck, you’re fucked.” And we did get luck. everything fitted in and the actors related in exactly the way I wanted them to.

McGann: When we arrived in the Lake District, where we started shooting, we had these adjacent rooms in a hotel with dividing doors between, It’s six, seven in the morning. I can hear next door, bottles clinking, ashtrays shuffling. Then there were noises like a wild animal, these low growls, and then this honey rose tobacco smoke coming between us, and then the door opens and it’s like Boris Karloff, and I’m in absolute hysterics.

Grant: He’s telling you a total lie. I was on a different floor to Paul McGann. You see, I’ve kept a diary on whatever film I’ve done, so whatever they claim they’re probably in for a big surprise when it comes out. Paul and I went to Penrith from Paddington and her started talking about how I was too tall to be an actor, and how all the great movie stars are short arses like himself, and then he quoted Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, all these dwarfs, until I finally summoned up John Wayne. He’s over six foot, and Clint Eastwood is tall, and I said, “Well what about those guys?” And he said, “Yeah, well a couple of pretenders.”

McGann: [Richard and I] had the usual quotient of nerves and a bit of irritation. It was hard going. I don’t recall there being any competition. There were times when I wanted to kill him and I’m sure there were times when he wanted to kill me as well. But there were also times when I was just gobsmacked at what he was doing, and I thought, this tosser can act. He was brilliant in this picture.

At the end of the first week it was going to grind to a halt. There were ructions, as far as I recall, after the first dailies had arrived. I don’t know where Denis O’Brien [George Harrison’s partner and the film’s executive producer] had been -I think he may have been in America – but he was horrified when he saw the first couple of days of dailies. A lot of this was kept from us – a couple of teenage kids who couldn’t bear adult information – but O’Brien’s beef was that this wasn’t the movie that they had commissioned, which is extraordinary.

What he expected, I think, if it’s not being too simplistic about it, was Monty Python. They’d made the Monty Python films, and they wanted something from the same stable. He’d seen Uncle Monty as this fat cartoon character. It was all going to be slapstick and silly walks. It must have been a bit tough for Bruce.

Grant: His [McGann’s] memory’s fucked; it was the first day. This great big gumbah turned up on the set like Sergeant Bilko and ripped out a page of the call sheet, the scene where Paul charges at this bull. And he said, “Right, you’re behind schedule, you can’t do this.” So Bruce said, “Right, fuck you,” and resigned from the film there and then. I had a quiet nervous breakdown over lunch, thinking, Oh I’ve told everybody I’ve finally made a movie and now the thing’s closing down. And David Wimbury, the associate producer, said, “Oh no, it’s just a ploy. The American is trying to frighten Robinson and Robinson is calling his bluff.” Anyway, by four o’clock that afternoon he was directing it again, and the bull scene was put back in.

[O’Brien] told Robinson that I should be playing it like Kenneth Williams, and swinging my arms around and screaming at the top of my lungs; and that comedy couldn’t be done in the dark. Bruce said, “Oh well. You’re wrong. It’s a comedy that doesn’t have any jokes or punchlines. It’s the desperation in the situation where the comedy will come from.” [O’Brien] said the scene where I say, “We’ve come on holiday by mistake,” was not funny. He said it should be nostril-pulling camping around. I said he should have stuck to financing. That really galvanised the whole “us against them”.

Robinson: The opening shot was the two guys arriving at the cottage. And I had it in my head what it should look like, and it should be pitch dark. So then [the producers] get in and look at the first day’s rushes and then think, Jesus Christ, what is this guy doing? Second thing was the scene when [Withnail and Marwood] discuss killing the chicken, which when you don’t know the two characters, it’s not funny. It’s like taking an ingredient out of a curry or something and saying, “Is this delicious?” Then here comes Uncle Monty, whom I specifically wanted to play the homosexuality very, very straight. They thought than an effeminate homosexual was amusing, and I didn’t. So there was a walk around this hillside and I said to them, “I’ll get on the bus now and go home: I really do know what this film is and it will be funny. either I’ll walk off now or you’re going to have to trust me and shut up.” And of course they trusted me and shut up. And they were on edge about it until the film came out.

McGann: But people were finding it funny: the crew were falling about laughing. [Bruce] was a bit superstitious about it; he thought if they’re laughing now they’re not going to laugh later, because he’s a worrier. We must have ruined miles of footage just laughing.

Why do you think the film has lasted the distance?

Robinson: I think the thing that makes it leap over the period is the relationship. When you’re young I guess everyone has that kind of intense friendship that has to end, to die. It’s also funny, which helps. I frankly find it strange that there is so much interest in the film.

Grant: I was asked to speak at the Union in Oxford last year – they would have been ten or eleven when the film first came out – so it obviously does keep going, mostly students. They told me in Oxford it’s like losing your virginity – it’s an initiation ritual. If you haven’t seen it you must see it; it’s a prerequisite. And the Etonians thought that it was about them. And the other people thought it was about them, so it obviously crosses over. The young British male. What I have noticed is that it appeals far more to men than it does to women.

What do you think about the re-release?

Robinson: It’s got absolutely nothing to do with me. I’m pleased for them [Feature Film Company, who are re-releasing the film] and I hope they have success with it. From my perspective, and I don’t want this to sound bitchy, but there is a downside to re-releasing the film which is that people discover Withnail and I and it therefore becomes theirs rather than something that has ben marketed and thrust at them.

Grant: I’m very curious about how it does because theoretically, if they re-release a film, you should either be dead or in your advanced dotage. I heard it was going to be December, and then it was going to be January, and I thought it was going to be exactly like the original release. When HandJobFilms, as we called them, made the film in 1986, it took them a year-and-a-half to get it out. I honestly believed it would never come out.

What impact did Withnail have on your career?

Robinson: Everything looked pretty good in terms of making the kinds of films I wanted to make, i.e. comedic little low-budget English films, and then it hit the fan over here and all the companies that financed these types of films liquidated, including HandMade. Next thing I’m in America: Jennifer 8 [Robinson’s 1992 Hollywood thriller] was not a success. A lot of mainstream directors could have done the film a lot better than I. I ended up trying to make an intense European film in an American context. So that was a bad career move.

Grant: I don’t think there is a single film that I have done that hasn’t been as a result of Withnail. That is the thing that has stuck in the head of whoever has employed me.

McGann: I’ve had enduring respect. And on a personal level, complete satisfaction. I don’t wish to sound worthy, but you could go on for years and never do even a remotely good film.

Would you work together again?

Grant: I have to work with [Bruce] again. It’s not a question of would, but when. Unless the stupid fucker drops dead.

Robinson: HandMade are now back in business and I had lunch with a couple of their people the other day. So as soon as this beastly Christmas is dealt with, I’m going to sit down and write a comedy. I’ll probably write a part in it for Richard. It would be lovely to work with him again, but i’d like to do something…maybe not as vicious.

Click the images below to see a larger version of the scanned article.

Empire Magazine – February 1996

Interview by Ian Nathan.

Richard E Grant. He was Withnail as opposed to I. He’s a dab hand at changing nappies (sort of). And he’s adamant that there shouldn’t be any stars or pat happy endings. But does Richard E. Grant know his gold top from his red?

Have you ever played the Withnail and I drinking game?

I’m allergic to alcohol, so I can’t. First question fucked.

Isn’t everyone allergic to alcohol though?

Erm, I don’t know, I literally can’t keep it down, so I’ve given up trying. I’m not teetotal because of any sort of moral thing, I’ve just got weak guts.

You don’t know any good hangover cures then?

God, I have no idea whatsoever. Some people say a Bloody Mary to top yourself up. I’ve never had one.

Do you think we should legalise drugs?

There is a battle cry every year about it. Alcohol is around and that is legal. Part of the fun is that they are illegal. It would be very boring to go down the corner shop and ask for four tabs of ecstasy and 15 kilos of coke for the weekend.

What does the E in your name stand for?

Ecstasy! Ha! No, E stands for another Equity member called Richard Grant. The only way they would allow me to keep my name was to put something in between. I went through the alphabet really quickly until I got to the letter E – the ones before that in the alphabet all had a bad association. All my friends call me Reg.

Okay Reg, is it true that you’re Hugh Grant’s brother?

Now what can I say about this? Well, so long as I’ve got my own hair and teeth, which I still have, it’s fine by me. Perhaps if they do a wonderful script for Nine Months 2, I could play his sister. He called me an ancient old fart in your magazine so I have no qualms about calling him a tired old has-been with a quiff. Stop twitching!

Is sex the primary force in the universe?

Absolutely. There is no greater thing…

When was the last time you were naked in the open air?

In France, about four months ago in the middle of summer. I have a house there and I generally walk around without my clothes on and frighten the neighbours. I have no burglar alarm.

Why do men have nipples?

So they can look at women more longingly, because they have something that each of us in our hearts desperately wants to have.

When was the last time you worried about money?

About five minutes ago. I’ve had every bill known to man just arrive in my mail. This time ten years ago I had been unemployed for about nine months. I’m not worried in the same way I was then.

Do you do your own shopping?

Yeah, I’m a shopoholic.

So how much is a pint of milk?

I have never drunk milk in my whole life, so I have no idea. No dairy for me. I hate it. Disgusting. It’s like cow’s mucus.

What’s the most you’ve ever spent on a pair of shoes?

God that’s a brutal question, I love shoes. Ah, two hundred pounds. that was in Rome, they’ve zips on them so you can get ’em on and get ’em off really fast. You don’t have to fart around with laces or anything like that. They are brilliant, just the sexiest zip-up shoes.

What’s the best gossip you’ve heard about yourself?

(Long pause) Errr…

That you were Hugh Grant’s brother?

That wouldn’t be the best bit. I don’t know, a 15 inch penis, the usual stand-by. They usually say I’m such a boring fart there’s nothing to write about me anyway. I’m just too nice.

Have you ever been in therapy?

I haven’t, but I’ve been advised to get some. Whatever’s going to get you through to the other side is fine by me.

Is God an old man with a long white beard?

Who?

God

No, I prefer his name spelt backwards, actually. I was brought up without any of that. A placebo for idiots to get through to the other side. I never subscribe to, nor have been brainwashed by that.

Is LA too PC?

Yes. You have to be in bed by nine and eat your food at six, eat four bean sprouts, a couple of lentils, and a teaspoon of wine just for your heartbeat. It’s ridiculous. But there is going to be a big backlash. Amanda De Cadenet is spearheading it; she’s holding the flag for us.

I bet you can always get a table at a restaurant.

God, the moment I say “yes” I’m going to be slaughtered as soon as you see me in the queue at Tesco’s. Yeah, I think it is one of the advantages if you are in something. But you have to keep doing things, you have to be seen in something, otherwise… Put it this way, I haven’t had to say I’m the brother of Hugh Grant, yet, to get in anywhere.

Which Carry On character did you most relate to?

Kenneth Williams playing a doctor. I think he’s just brilliant. If I even think about his nostrils it makes me laugh. I grew up on Just A Minute on the World Service. Before I saw him on film, I didn’t know what human being was capable of making those (very accurate Kenneth Williams impression) “Ooorrarr” sounds. I loved him.

Have you ever wanted to punch a director or another actor?

On every single job. If I gave you the list I would never work again.

Music Magazine – 1996

By Richard E Grant

A black boxed record set with a Technicolor picture of Egyptian slaves amassed between a row of sphinxes, bearing the peculiar title Aida, was the bookend of my parents’ record collection. The colour still was from Cecil B de Mille’s The Ten Commandments. I was eleven, living in Swaziland and learning about the pharaohs and pyramids in 1968, which is what led me to open up the box to listen and see whether the vinyl would reveal the sounds of ancient Egypt.

As I knew not a word of Italian, I had no problem suspending disbelief that this was in fact the accent and music of the Nile. Significantly for me, it was set on the same continent as Swaziland, though thousands of miles north, and remained my only cultural connection, albeit tenuous, to African history. Consequently, vast choruses of Ethiopians in traditional dress belting their lungs out had a contemporary counterpart in the Swazi Raindance ceremony and so were bound to make an impression.

Having never heard an opera before, I found Verdi’s dramatics a revelation. The sleeve notes provided the only clue as to what it might look like in a theatre. Renata Tebaldi’s potently beautiful voice was difficult to reconcile with her photograph, in which she more closely resembled an old boiler than a recently captured Ethiopian princess. Similarly, the picture of Karajan conducting a chorus of casually dressed Caucasians contradicted the picture of the ‘real thing’ on the cover, which was in colour and ‘in costume’. This ambivalence in opera between how people sound and what they look like has persisted for me. It remains the one form of theatre that I have often preferred to imagine than actually to attend.

This pre-teen discovery of Verdi coincided with parental upheaval and subsequent divorce, so the story and music had immediate impact and, in the deluded way of the best artistic encounters, I was convinced that I was the only person to whom all this drama was being addressed. It struck me as uncanny that my parents’ love triangle so closely matched the libretto, though the setting was more ‘Happy Valley’ than ‘Valley of the Kings’. This territorial sense of possession has persisted so much that when some gasbag in the Covent Garden box office queue dismissed Aida as ‘a load of trumped-up spaghetti drama’, I initially felt pity, swiftly followed by Don Corleone-inspired plans to have him garotted and/or wrapped in newspaper and sent home accompanied by dead fish. Opera, undeniably, provokes irrational emotions.

Shortly after, my father decided that a cultural crash-course was necessary after so many years in the ‘bush’. This translated into a six-week European tour, including time in Rome and an invitation to the opera. This was my first such opportunity, the closest being three performances of The Gondoliers at the Swaziland Theatre Club, notable more for seeing the chief of police in tights than the thrust of his vocals.

So off we went. The only seats left were in a box that was almost on top of the stage. The discovery that the opera was Aida and that the overture was being played by a live orchestra was for me a moment of never-to-be-forgotten serendipity. Gwyneth Jones sang the title role and, although she looked older and wider than the ‘beautiful young princess’ described in the programme, the sound that came out of this live human was awesome, as was the sheer scale of everything to be seen. And we could see everything, since our box overlooked the orchestra directly below and was so close to the stage that everything going on in the crowded wings was on view as well. Rather than breaking the scenic illusion, it intensified the whole event. By the time the stage was congested with slaves, dancers, soldiers, horses and a baby elephant, trumpeting the triumphal march, my short-back-and-sides hair was on end. The power of that evening remains a life-changing moment that I never expected to have repeated; a fantastic collision of much and spectacle sung in an exotic tongue of which I never understood a single word. When eventually the two lovers were singing their farewells from within their transparent gauze-swathed tomb, the rest of my family were asleep. Which confounded me.

Kitted out with a couple of marionettes, replete with movable mouths, I subsequently started a puppet collection, built a full-sized theatre in our garage, and devised a show that included a send-up of the final duet, using a cassette tape recorder which my father bought me in Las Palmas, en route to Africa by sea. None of us had ever seen such a machine before, and the microphone made it possible to record loud snoring sounds over the Verdi. I mention this because, even then, opera struck me as such a bizarre form of entertainment, simultaneously capable of being sublime and totally ridiculous.

Midway through drama school, I was given a flight ‘overseas’ for my 21st birthday and spent ten days with a friend in Vienna. We went to the State Opera almost every evening, queuing for standing room for hours. The most extraordinary performance was Zeffirelli’s production of La boheme with Domingo giving it the ‘full Monty’. It was made all the more memorable upon leaving the theatre to discover everywhere knee-deep in snow, mirroring what we had just seen on stage. I had never seen snow in Swaziland.

Bluebeard’s Castle at La Fenice, Venice, completed my whistle-stop historical catch-up. All of which was later reported in forsenic detail to my mentors, Bunny Barnes and Tom Bayley in Mbabane, who between them were responsible for my introduction to music and theatre, and offered endless support, inspiration and strong opinions. When I was 14, Bunny had decided that it was time I was introduced to Puccini, so she cooked a large apfelstrudel, closed her drawing room curtains and plonked the first disc of Madam Butterfly onto the hi-fi.

What we were about to experience, she announced, was the aural equivalent of eating a vastly rich fruitcake at a single sitting, and therefore something had to be indulged in, with judicious infrequency. Hence the strudel. ‘And if you think the plot is improbable, just look at the track record of the American Peace Corps floating about the countryside, fathering tots and promising their young Swazi concubines a visa to the USA, never to be heard of or seen again, when they depart.’

The romantics of Verdi and Co, were selectively dished up whilst Wagner was put on ice, ‘till such time as you are thoroughly pre-cooked in the 19th century classics. Until then, what’s next is an astringent interim smorgasbord of Mozart.’ Cosi fan tutte was first up and, upon leaving Swaziland for University in 1976, the farewell quarter sung by the parting lovers provided the soundtrack that racked my heart and head. But not before I had put my ears to the wall of Wagner.

Bunny suggested ‘diving right in at the deep end’ with Tristan and Isolde, but said she was only prepared ‘to sit through the overture, before having to evacuate the room, as the music is so erotically charged I cannot hold myself responsible or cope with close proximity to another human being, once its power is unleashed, for fear of spontaneous combustion.’ She was in her fifties at the time, and as she had known me since birth and taught me to play the piano, I was somewhat taken aback by this revelation.

Being in a high old hormonal upheaval myself, I instantly scoured the libretto for scenes of salaciousness, but never having been in a love triangle before, my first reaction to the score was more ‘Bermuda’ bewilderment – the sexuality disappearing in thin ears. It would be some years before my experience of unrequited or thwarted love went deeper than a brief fixation upon a Scandinavian blonde who could only speak five words of English, rendering her as unreachable as Rapunzel. Hardly in Tristan’s league, though subsequent batterings have deepened my appreciation and understanding of this epic.

However, I have found that the tempo of Mozart most resembles the speed of thought and emotion experienced in ordinary life, whereas every time I have endured watching Wagner, slow-motion tending toward paralysis seems to afflict the performers. And my eyelids. With the result that I have retreated to buying CDs rather than tickets. In my late teens, obsessed with Mahler, and having read about his legendary conducting of Wagner in Vienna, I was disappointed to discover that he avoided composing any opera himself, causing my mentors to offer up Richard Strauss, as the ‘closest and next best thing’. Birgit Nilsson giving Elektra was deemed ‘the last gasp of the true Romantic Movement, before “Cacophany and Co.” took over’.

This ad-hoc education competed with acne, platform shoes, Ziggy Stardust, Elton John, A-levels, Deep Purple, Paul Simon and stints in amateur theatre club productions of Camelot and A funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum before I drove 12,000 miles south to Cape Town University to the strains of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. In freshers’ week, I went to see Norma, which fulfilled every pre-conceived cliché about opera at its most laughable – gargantuan settings, presumably in an attempt to downsize the vast girth of the soprano, and a Lautrec-legged tenor stomping about in Nose-wear. I overheard a man during one of the intervals remark that ‘that woman ought to get one of those Callas-type tape-worms installed’.

Since those early experiences, I have increasingly become peripatetic about opera-going, concluding that when it’s good, it is very very good, but when it is bad, ye gad’s it’s too expensive to even have a cackle about. And yet…..in its very artificiality, expense and extravagance, it is capable of expressing love or loss with greater power than words can muster. Hence, I assume this is why two thousand people in dinner jackets and Dior can boo as one, or jump to their collective feet and scream ‘bravo!’. Likewise, a hundred thousand people in a football field can be quelled by three tenors singing hundred-year-old love songs. Bunny’s wisdom was this: ‘See and hear everything, for so long as you live you will never hear or see everything there is.’