Being Mr Wickham
Written and performed by Adrian Lukis
Directed by Guy Unsworth
Minerva Theatre, Chichester
Star rating: 4
Everybody remembers Pride and Prejudice’s Mr Wickham. He’s the cad who elopes with Lydia and has to be paid off by Darcy. But few remember him better than actor Adrian Lukis who played him the 1995 TV version, famed for Colin Firth in a wet shirt.
Lukis’s entertaining 60 minute play presents Wickam at 60 reminiscing late at night in his own home. And he’s very good company as he flirts knowingly with the audience and shows us exactly why first Elizabeth, and then Lydia, fell for him. He and Lydia have had a tiff earlier in the evening and she’s shut him out of the bedroom. Yes, they are still together, because – peccadillos on both sides, notwithstanding – they complement each other in their hedonism.
This piece is funny from any point of view although the better you know Pride and Prejudice the richer it is. And he does make assumptions about that when, for example, he simply says, referring to Mrs Bennet “And that mother …” It is also poignant in places. The sexagenarian Mr Wickham is occasionally wistful and he certainly knows his Byron.
Lukis gives us his childhood growing up with standoffish Darcy and there’s diversion into his schooldays with a vicious schoolmaster on whom the adult Wickham eventually takes revenge. We also get a recollection of seeing Byron and a famous courtesan at the theatre. And I liked the recognitions of the horror of the Battle of Waterloo. The play fleshes out, and builds on, Jane Austen’s novel
Thus we meet, and hear Wickham’s views on, most of the characters in Pride and Prejudice including a summary of where they all are “now” – around 1855 with Victoria firmly on the throne and less establishment approval of “fun”.
Many actors I see (and often don’t hear) are busily channelling Stanislavskian naturalism at the expense of Stanislavskian clarity. Lukis is definitely not one of them. He’s an old school actor who sounds every end consonant and speaks to everyone in the room despite the constraints of the Minerva’s thrust stage. And he does this without ever seeming mannered. Bravo.
Most impressive of all though is Lukis’s timing. He knows exactly how to drop asides and let them rest – while he half grins or cocks an eyebrow, as the audience responds. He is, for a long time, very condemnatory of Darcy but eventually, after a pause, says “But of course there was a sister… ” and waits for the audience to remember and chuckle. Then his Wickham gives a hilarious account of her £30,000 fortune not mattering followed by a well practised raconteur’s account of her being rescued from his clutches.
It’s a very accomplished show. Every drama school student should see it.
