Being Mr Wickham review – Jane Austen’s cad meanders

Jermyn Street theatre, London
Adrian Lukis’s self-penned one-man show revisits the character he played in Pride and Prejudice on TV in 1995, but doesn’t discover much

Those who watched Andrew Davies’ 1995 TV adaptation of Pride and Prejudice might still have Colin Firth’s Darcy, dripping his way out of a lake, branded in their memory. Starring alongside him in the series was Adrian Lukis as George Wickham, who returns here to tell us what became of him after his shenanigans at Pemberley and Longbourn. This one-act, hour-long monologue written and performed by Lukis imagines Jane Austen’s charming cad, with whom Lydia Bennet scandalously eloped, in his drawing room aged 60.

In a production directed by Guy Unsworth, Wickham sits, gets up to look out of the window and sits back down to sip wine and burble amicably in reminiscence. We learn, unsurprisingly, that he disliked Darcy as a boy and was held in awe by the sight of uber rake Lord Byron at the theatre. More surprisingly, Lydia is still his wife. There are some melancholic ruminations on the battle of Waterloo and a twist in Darcy’s early betrayal of him. He also reflects on a murderous act, but it is a line in passing that, like the others, is not built on. The musings are nicely written, smoothly performed and carry potential to grow into a fully fledged story but they are left as meanderings that do not lead anywhere in particular.