Being Mr Wickham: quick links
For many of us, the award-winning 1995 BBC production of Pride and Prejudice starring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle is the classic by which all others are judged. Who can forget Firth’s smouldering Mr Darcy Fitzwilliam and Ehle’s perky Elizabeth Bennet? Alongside these two and the other stellar cast members, actor Adrian Lukis triumphed as George Wickham, the complete cad with a complex back-story who runs away with Elizabeth’s younger sister Lydia.
Being Mr Wickham: 30 years later
Thirty years on, Lukis returns to inhabit the character’s body and soul in this superb one-man show Being Mr Wickham, written and performed by Lukis, and currently showing at the intimate underground space that is the Jermyn Street Theatre. Hidden in plain sight in the West End, this must be the smallest (and friendliest) theatre in London.
The show opens to a simple but effective drawing-room set designed by Libby Watson – an armchair and a side-table with a decanter of red wine, backed by some panelling and a few frosted windows. We are joining Wickham at home on the occasion of his 60th birthday.
Being Mr Wickham: reflections on a scandalous life
Lydia (yes, still his wife) has gone to bed in high dudgeon, accusing her husband of making eyes at another lady at the ball. She’s now ‘snorting away like a warthog’ in the bedroom as Wickham sips the wine and reminisces on his ‘scandalous life’. As he says with a cheeky smile and a raised eyebrow ‘much of it is unrepeatable!’ Still, he acknowledges many sins, including the ‘painted whores and swaggering bucks’ of Covent Garden and admits that he and Mr Denny behaved like ‘a couple of alley cats’ whenever they had the chance.
Building on the facts as we know them from Jane Austen, Lukis has created a life beyond Pemberley and the pages of Pride and Prejudice. This is a Wickham who is a lot older, a little wiser, and told in his own words. ‘I hope I have managed to stay within the bounds of credibility and true to the spirit of Jane Austen’ says Lukis in the program notes, and he has certainly achieved his aim.
The claret-infused meanderings revisit the cruelties of fate, the brutality of boarding school, the loves and losses of life, and the challenges of growing old with ‘the belly cascading over the britches’. Still, as he so wryly observes of old age ‘better it comes than it doesn’t…’
Being Mr Wickham: charming and erudite storyteller
As the play unfolds, we see that Wickham still holds a deep fondness for Pemberley, a place ‘that was bathed in a perpetual sunset’. He may have mellowed with age and be ready to admit to his sins, but he clearly loved every moment of the ‘drunkenness, gambling and lust’. And throughout, he is a charming and erudite storyteller.
Read: Sh!t-faced Shakespeare review: boozed up Hamlet at Leicester Square
Directed with a confident hand by Guy Unsworth, Being Mr Wickham is an absolute delight and a master-class in understated, intelligent theatre. This is how a one-man show should be done! I’d give it six stars if I could.
Being Mr Wickham will be performed at Jermyn Street Theatre until 30 August 2025.
