A witty, eloquent lyric for a new generation of struggling artists
Maria Telnikoff insists you don’t have to have seen the 1987 British film Withnail and I to enjoy her modern, feminist reimagining, but I admit it was this very premise that had me rushing for a chance to review it. The cult classic has captured the imagination of anyone who has dreamed of making it in the harsh reality of the creative industries, ever since Richard E Grant and Paul McGann first staggered about ‘60s Camden in fraying coats to match their fraying relationship, and my friends were no exception. Sitting around in a series of chilly Edinburgh flats as a student, Withnail and Marwood’s irresponsible play-acting as grown ups justified our behaviour; we saw part of ourselves in their ricocheting between moods and dingy pubs, uncertainty about the future quashed with another tinny and the promise we’d always have each other. The romantic notion of the ‘struggling artist’ withers under the lights in Bruce Robinson’s film – both eponymous characters went to ludicrously expensive private schools, and when the day-to-day existential angst exacerbated by an ever-growing mountain of washing up gets too much (‘I think there may be something living in there’, pleads Marwood in a pivotal scene), they can capitalise on their privilege of having a conveniently loaded uncle with a house in the Lake District to escape to.
With Nail and and Without Nail’s set-up mirrors the original film, following the lives of two struggling artists, Nell and Christie, in their 2020’s Camden flat. In this version, however, they have ‘no rich Uncle Monty to help bail them out and no Eton education or white male privilege on their side’. ‘It’s a radical departure from the original movie’, Telkinoff writes, ‘yet brings the film’s central question into focus: what is the reality behind the romantic notion of a ‘struggling artist’? And crucially for this production, what does it mean to be a struggling artist today amid a cost-of-living crisis and with funding for the arts at an all-time low?’ For Nell and Christie, the dire situation for would-be full-time creatives and the arts as a whole manifests in the bemoaning of nepo-babies and the easy life of ‘Tom Hollandaise’, bare fridge shelves (the exciting find of a jar of olives is hastily abandoned upon reading the sell-by date), and a desperate mining for sellable content (‘offed by an olive!’/ ‘that’s good, write that down’). Nell has a dim flash of inspiration while balefully scrolling past an advert for ‘depressed girl tears’ on Etsy, as Christie mourns an empty Cheerios box. Nell readies us for the emotional rollercoaster of the play’s tone from the off here: ‘I’m going to cry – quick, get a jar! Oh, never mind, the feeling’s passed’.
Chakira Alin and Rachel Andrews sing – often literally – as Nell and Christie, the comfortable chemistry between them enabling an unbridled, irresistible nervous energy. Their whiplash-inducing traversing of soaring highs and devastatingly low funks reflects that of Withnail and Marwood, in the context of a post-pandemic generation trying to make a living in London following years of austerity, arts-hostile government policy and astronomical rises in living costs. As in the source material, an existential panic hums beneath the two twenty-somethings’ banal, frustrating ventures, rising to fever pitch when the pointlessness of it all swims into unignorable vision. They give voice to the exhaustion of having three jobs to pay the bills on top of trying to make their dreams a reality, with Nell sighing, ‘I just wish I could have a day off’ – not from her side hustles, but from the pressure of having to be constantly creatively productive in order to justify calling herself an artist.
The pair decide they need a holiday; specifically, to get out of the city. ‘There’s life outside London, you know!’ Christie points out. ‘Is there?’ Nell wonders. They peer into the audience as if trying to find it, speaking to the London-centric bias of artistic opportunities in the UK, with a recent diverting of £75 million of Arts Council funding outside the capital in order to level up access to the arts. The ventriloquist friend they set off to visit in Glasgow turns out to have received a £30,000 state-funded grant, prompting Nell and Christie to decide they’d actually rather not see her any more, passionately dismissing her work as a ‘pile of wank’. They muse on the idea they may be terrible people, but there simply isn’t enough of this vital financial support to go around: the economic stability and connections in the art world reserved for the elite are as important as ever in opening doors for up-and-coming imaginative practitioners. The young women can’t escape this bind, and as the initial excitement of a spontaneous holiday wears off, their old fears and the unshakeable reality of their situation stays with them.
Foraging in Epping Forest, renditions of Oedipus Rex and Joseph and the Technicolour Dreamcoat, cursed knickers and cereal jewellery delight on the absurd comedic journey to an uncertain, though hopeful close. While the play’s end felt a little rushed – more like that of a first act – this is a testament to the feeling of not wanting the story to end, invested as the audience was in the unstable, open-ended lives of these two young actors. Razor-sharp, deeply funny, relatable, timely and poignant, With Nail and Without Nail deserves all the accolades it will surely get – and if you’re reading, Arts Council, a healthy chunk of funding to boot.
