Review: WILKO: LOVE AND DEATH AND ROCK 'N' ROLL, Southwark Playhouse Borough

Jonathan Maitland’s portrayal starts when Wilko Johnson at the height of his fame has the bad luck to be marked for death both on screen and off. As Game of Thrones’ mute executioner who lops off Eddard Stark's head, he ends up on Arya Stark's infamous list; months later, he’s given the worst possible news: a tumour in his pancreas meant that Johnson had less than a year left to live.

Despite the early promise shown by his musical career, it was Wilko’s other loves - his never ending supply of speed and his surfeit of self-regard - that eventually got in the way of a happy ever after. Despite being close to him in the latter part of his life, Maitland doesn’t shy away from these aspects and Wilko is no blinkered hagiography of the Canvey Island guitarist. Think of it more as a potted history of a complicated man with live music thrown in for good measure. 

His early life sees him bounce around from busking outside the local hotel to studying English Literature and becoming a teacher. Like Sting before him, he abandons the classroom for the recording studio and, with his band Dr Feelgood, ends up providing the missing musical link between the Beatles and the Sex Pistols. That alone would have earned him a spot in twentieth-century history but it is his victory over cancer that won him the most headlines.

Life imitates life so the cast of the fictional Dr Feelgood are another collection of “Johns”: Johnson Willis plays lyricist and player of the “gun guitar” Wilko alongside Jon House (singer Lee Brilleaux), David John (drummer Big Figure) and honorary non-John Georgina Field (bassist Sparko). With a few more songs this could have described itself as gig theatre but there’s plenty of rock action to bounce along to including “She Does It Right”, “Roxette” and utterly savage “Sound Of The City”.

Although his lyrics were simplistic, intended to be hammered home at close quarters by Brilleaux’s snarly vocals, Wilko was a man in love with language and Maitland throws in enough Mockney banter, cheeky quotes (“there’s no afterlife unless you count record sales”) and thoughts on life to sufficiently outline his intelligent outlook. His views on Essex are wide-ranging (if Kent is the Garden of England, his home county was “its patio”) and tie into his love of literature; at one point, he draws a line from the local estuary that inspired Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now to indicate in some way Essex’s impact on the world.

Director Dugald Bruce-Lockhart infuses his subject with a never-ending supply of kinetic charisma but knows how to keep our attention when the action slows down. The most touching scenes are with Georgina Fairbanks as Wilco’s wife Irene. Watching the pair slowly come together and fall in love then angrily fall apart lacks the expected sentimental gloop or soapy melodrama; instead Willis and Fairbanks show genuine chemistry in several well-paced scenes. 

When this play opened last year in Queen’s Theatre, Hornchurch in his beloved Essex, a recorded message from Wilko was played: “I might be brown bread (by then) but there’s nothing I can do about that, right? Otherwise I’ll be there. And I hope you enjoy the show. And I hope I’m not dead.” Sadly, he couldn’t make the event: despite his best efforts, John Andrew Wilkinson died on 21 November 2022.

Wilko continues at Southwark Playhouse Borough until 19 April

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