Thirty years after the BBC’s wildly popular version of Pride and Prejudice hit our television screens, the actor who played Mr Wickham brings his play about what Jane Austen’s biggest cad did next back to Jermyn Street Theatre (2nd year running, 12-30 Aug) and Bath’s Old Theatre Royal (20-21 Sep).
Adrian Lukis took some time out of a very busy schedule to have a chat by phone.
Pride and Prejudice kickstarted the modern period drama. Did it seem that special when you were making it?
Andrew Davies had distilled the novel into a very impressive adaptation, and the table read went well, so I think we were all optimistic!
There was a meticulous attention to detail over all aspects of the production. It was of course an incredibly talented and very nice cast, which always helps! And Simon Langton the director was brilliant.
I think we all knew we were making something pretty good, but none of us could have anticipated the mega success it turned out to be!
One never really expects it. You just think, well, I’ve done my work as well as I can and wait for the reviews.
You’ve done other high profile roles over the years. Why return to one from thirty years ago?
I’d done a lot of research for another show about Jane Austen, so was very familiar with the period.
And I was intrigued by Mr Wickham, regarded as the quintessential bad boy- was he really such an irredeemable man?
People would often ask me what was it like playing such a terrible character! So, I suppose I set out to write a defence of Wickham – not to exonerate him, but to perhaps explain why he became the man he was.
He’s so dissolute and deplorable. I found myself slightly tongue in cheek defending him, saying that he was born without money, and his personality was very different from Darcy’s. As they were brought up together, Wickham was very charming and loved by Darcy’s father.
If you were to defend Mr Wickham, you could start with this childhood rivalry and enmity. The 12 year old Darcy must have looked at 12 year old Wickham, who everybody adored, and started to resent him.
There’s always two sides. If you have a friend who tells you her husband left and behaved disgracefully, you then talk to him and hear she was a nightmare!
I suppose that kicked me off in that direction. No one really, willingly, talks bad of themselves. We tend to elevate our position in conversation, saying “I didn’t do anything wrong” or “I was misunderstood”
Wickham is very keen to exonerate himself at all times, so that’s how I wrote him. Also to see if I could write.
When I got to about the age of 60, I thought if I always wanted to write, to get it done!
As I researched and wrote more, the writing became better and stronger. I put it in the format of speaking to the audience.
That helps when Wickham is persuading you he’s hard done by; at the end of play, if I have succeeded people come up and say “I really shouldn’t like you, but ..”.
Had you thought before that what might have happened to the character? Has your opinion changed since you first played him?
Well, the whole play is Mr Wickham looking back over his life. A lot about his childhood at a rather barbaric school, then meeting the Bennet girls about two-thirds into the story.
It’s a slightly sugar-coated version of him. I don’t think he’s a saint, and I could have been harsh and make him quite unpleasant.
I think he acknowledges that he has I behaved poorly at times, but he tends to sort of excuse it with “what was I supposed to do? You know I had no money?”
Essentially, “you know people liked me, people were charmed by me, that’s not really my fault, it’s just the way it was.”
There’s one point, he says, you know, “I came to London, I resolved to study the Law. I studied by candlelight for several long weeks.” He acknowledges the fact that he didn’t really have the drive to become a lawyer.
He’s not going to say “I’m an absolute pig, I reneged on my debts, I betrayed my friends, I slept with all the shop girls, I betrayed Elizabeth, I seduced Lydia”.
I think that in a way would be reiterating the novel, and so I went, I kicked off on a different tack, and once I’d done that, it came fairly easily. I don’t think he’s a man on death row confessing to the crimes of his life.
He’s a man saying “look, everybody’s got me wrong, I gambled a bit. Yeah, I slept with a few girls, but, come on, you know. ” That’s the sort of tone I took.
I did a lot of research and realised that the Regency period was chock full of bounders, cads, dissolute gamblers, and womanisers. Their morality was very different from the morality we have today.
We are living through strictly moral times, I think at the moment, and the Regency wasn’t it’s quite the same. You have a different tone to it, and that’s what I try to reflect.
I never expected Wickham
and Lydia to last! He is after all one of literature’s great cads and fraudsters. Perhaps that is his penance!
That’s a really good point! I think Lydia is instinctive and sensual, described at one point as being “a young lady with high animal spirits”, code in those days for enjoying herself. She’s not a cerebral blue stocking.
She’s somebody who enjoys the dancing, being attractive, and everything that goes with it. I think she gets the man that she deserves in a way, and he probably gets the woman he deserves. I decided to keep them together.
With Lydia the assumption, of course, is that he left her years ago and he’s ended up married to an heiress or he’s living with a prostitute, and he’s penniless.
I just thought I’m going to take it at a different angle, and what if actually weirdly were still together? The more I thought about it, the more it made sense, really.
He says at one point, “she and I have exactly the same animal. We’re both impetuous headstrong, immoral, dissolute, and you know, and we make each other laugh. I’d rather that than a 1000 pretty girls with nothing to say.”
My feeling with Lydia is that it’s the beginning of the play. He has obviously been at a dance, and he’s flirted with another woman, and she’s stormed out in absolute fury.
She gets him, I think, and you know then it’s up to her whether she forgives him. We all know Lydia’s partial to a uniform, and she’s not behave in an exemplary way herself. You know, they’re sort of suited to each other in life.
What made you get involved in the original streamed version?
Towards the end of lockdown. I’d written a bare bones version of the play. And I got in touch with Original Theatre, having met a friend on my daily walk who recommended them.
Alistair Whately, who runs the company, loved it and asked me to have it ready in 8 weeks for a livestream.
So I locked myself in the flat and wrote ferociously and then thought I’m going to have to learn it because I’m writing new material,
We had a week’s rehearsal, and we live streamed it, which was fairly frightening; 3 cameras, hard to rehearse with everybody in masks. Then on the nightit was introduced by Libby Purves, the music started, and off we went.
It was a very interesting experience. The first night of a play, however experienced you are, is quite an unnerving experience.
You either become a zombie staring at the floor, or you charge around vomiting – most of us have to work hard to overcome that.
Since then, though, I’ve done a 3 week run in New York and went to Australia. Now it’s been all over the country in the last few months because it’s Jane Austen’s 250th anniversary. It’s picking up a lot of interest.
Now it’s very different to perform to a group of people rather than a camera.
Jane Austen never goes out of fashion. Why is that?
It’s just the writing, Having having read and re-read all her books, she’s just great. She really is. She’s surprisingly interesting, and there’s a lot of depth to her.
She’s funny, and I think we all like people with his look at the world with a slightly jaded eye, an amused eye. She’s very, very good at puncturing pomposity, which is, of course, wonderful.
She seems to have an ability to see through people. Think of the beginning of Mansfield Park, where “Bertram’s greatest delight is looking up his name in Burke’s Peerage.” Well, there we are, we’ve got that guy.
There’s the politics, the religion of the time, and how that informs her work. “Sense and Sensibility,” and which is best, wisdom and authority, or following your instincts.
For Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, it wasn’t seeing Darcy in his wet shirt (not in the novel, of course) that does it for her, but his generosity to the poor. The critical moment when her eyes are opened.
So Austen is funny and complex as well, reflecting the dilemmas of her own period on how best to live a good life.
Adrian Lukis appears in Being Mr Wickham at Jermyn Street Theatre, London and the Old Theatre Royal, Bath.