All eyes on the Queen’s Theatre for Wilko-an outstanding production based on an extraordinary figure in music history.

Queen’s Theatre steps in 2024 with a fantastic world premiere-Johnson Willis is outstanding. Not a five but six star performance that is worthy of its place in the West End-A brilliant must see! ******

Our theatre reviewer Ruth Kettle-Frisby shared her review of the Queen’s Theatre world premiere Wilko.

Cleverly staged underneath a glaring, sterile halo signalling the sanctity of medical wisdom, Wilko is an outstanding production centering an extraordinary figure in alternative music history.

The play develops Wilko Johnson’s character in dream-like retrospective episodes, from the perspective of existential clarity and paradoxical liberation with which he interprets his terminal pancreatic cancer diagnosis. 

Chronicling the history of the life of a Canvey Island boy: from humble beginnings meeting his Canvey Island wife and conception of the great Dr Feelgood, to the dizzying heights of sex, and drugs, and Blockhead fame; the play takes us on a globe-trotting, conscience twisting journey. 

Johnson Willis – in his drawling, contemplative diction – nails the performer’s erudite combination of temerity and wit,situating literary sentiments and expression at the heart of Wilko’s approach to relationships and art. Epic poems, sagas, plays and novels furnished Wilko with a variety of interchanging creative lenses, inspiring him to write about what he knew. 

Willis is particularly effective in his expression of Wilko’s irreverent humour and sardonic wit, for instance when he playfully pulverises prominent prog rock bands of the time, and when he confronts his school masters with cutting poetic crudity. However, Willis also embodies a gentleness and serenity; a tangible sadness reverberates throughout the audience when he loses his beloved Irene Knight to cancer. 

Ensnared by fame and fortune, the hearts of socially invincible white men don’t tend to emerge scot-free, and we do get hints of Wilko Johnson’s uncompromising volatility and selfishness; interestingly, a ghostly mirage of his cuckolded wife returns with nothing but magnanimity for her tortured widow. Georgina Fairbanks is wonderful as Irene, and the play shines a light on her catalytic role in the very existence of Wilko the performer, as well as her profound presence as his soulmate until the end.

Fairbanks, Georgina Field, Jon House and David John play multiple characters through time seamlessly; the acting is outstanding from all. Onstage chemistry with the talented Jon House (who plays lead singer, Lee Brilleaux) – the yan to Wilko’s yin – is palpable: tempestuously truncated exchanges are juxtaposed with the enduring tenderness with which Wilko held his friend and bandmate close to his heart.  

To stage Wilko and deliver such a moving and convincing performance will have entailed a considerable risk: Wilko Johnson is a pivotal icon and giant in alternative British music history – and as much as he is recognised for his signature idiosyncrasies (such as wielding his Fender Telecaster at the audience in a dark-humoured simulation of an automatic killing spree), the intensity of his onstage persona remains inherently inimitable. 

Pregnant with an enormous pancreatic tumour, Wilko defied the odds. During a mammoth procedure, his celebrated surgeon peeled the cancer away like an orange, enabling our phoenix of rock history to rise from the operating table – by no means unscathed – but alive and kicking, as only Wilko Johnson ever could. And – I suspect – as only Johnson Willis could do such justice to.

Photo Credit: Mark Sepple

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