A pride of Johns?: most of the cast of Wilko: Love and Death and Rock ‘n Roll, which features Johnson Willis as Wilko (left), Jon House as Lee Brilleaux, Georgina Field as Sparko (right) and David John as Big Figure (on drums)

KEN TOWL reviews a new play with music about the enigmatic but brusque, uxorious and faithless John Wilkinson, and his band of other Johns

Collective nouns. They’re great, aren’t they?

“An embarrassment of riches”. “A murder of crows”. But what about Johns? What is the collective noun for Johns?

This appears to have been determined in 1971, when guitarist John Wilkinson fell in with bassist John B Sparks, drummer John Martin and singer and harmonica player Lee John Collinson. Collectively, they became Dr Feelgood and, individually, to avoid confusion, Wilko Johnson, Sparko, The Big Figure and Lee Brilleaux.

Why does this matter?

It matters because Wilko: Love and Death and Rock ’n Roll is on at the Southwark Playhouse for a month starting from March 20 and, judging by the preview that I was privileged to see on Monday, it is going to be a riot (in cell block No9?).

A mixture of drama and musical performance, it makes a fitting tribute to its central character Wilko Johnson, the innovative guitarist and songwriter who died, eventually, in 2022, having been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer in 2013. He is portrayed with great skill as the enigmatic sensitive but brusque, uxorious and faithless artist that he was by actor-musician Johnson Willis (where do they get these names from?).

Willis channels the famous Wilko death stare, jerky movements and choppy guitar style in a way that is uncanny.

We are treated to a handful of songs (including Roxette, She Does It Right and Going Back Home) between scenes from the play. The band looks good: Willis duck-walks up and down chopping at his machine gun guitar. Jon (another one!) House as a tough, charismatic Lee Brilleaux, commands the front of the stage with his voice and harmonica and really looks the part, as does David John (yes!) battering hell out of his drum kit.

Sparko, on the other hand, in the guise of Georgina Field, does not look a lot like the Sparko that I remember. The suit is right, a pale two piece, but any visual similarity ends there.

I spoke to Field after the playing was over; she was rather glamorous in a way that Sparko, very much, wasn’t. They are a small company, she told me, so they had to play multiple parts. She played Johnson’s mother and also his mother-in-law.

Field was being modest. She also played bass guitar like she had been born to it. The director has played a blinder by blind-casting. Quite literally so; if you closed our eyes very tightly, you could imagine that Sparko was on stage instead of Georgina Field.

But this is no mere tribute act. Willis excels in the dramatic scenes, convincingly tender in scenes with his wife, a solid performance by Georgina Fairbanks and scarily aggressive when squaring up to the tough, no-nonsense Lee Brilleaux.

It is in one of these scenes that we see the genesis of She Does It Right, Wilko building the song as he tries to express his feelings about his wife, another in which we see the band fall apart, in real life an event shrouded in mystery and conflicting accounts. Here we are treated to a poignant but very funny representation of what is often referred to as “musical differences”.

The play is written by Jonathan Maitland, which goes a good way to explaining why the dramatic scenes work (the former BBC broadcaster and sometime Sutton Guardian reporter has written The Interview, An Audience With Jimmy Saville and The Last Temptation of Boris Johnson, among others), but the cast deserve a lot of the credit.

The musicians have evolved into a band in their own right; they do it right. Meanwhile, a look at the Southwark Playhouse website suggests that tickets are, understandably, selling fast with some nights already unavailable.

Fans of Dr Feelgood will love this play, of course, but so will anyone who cares about love and death and rock ’n roll.

• Tickets for this exciting, foot-tapping new play are available now for the show that opens at the Southwark Playhouse Borough on March 20 and runs through to April 19. Click here for details.
• WIN!!! We have two pairs of tickets as prizes in a fabulous competition exclusively for Inside Croydon patrons. Click here for entry details

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