As Dissolute As Desperate

You never ask about Withnail’s family, in part because you know he must hate them at least half as much as you hate your own. Only on him it’s romantic as well as pathetic, this electrifying cast-off of a privileged house deigning to walk among mere students for love of art. You’ve known a lot of intimidating classmates with a reputation for arrogance, from whom you as a serious actor know well enough to distance yourself – but none like him, who declaim like Victorian stage magicians, all the time, even in the inconvenient hours of the morning, who stride like they’re waving around a blade and gesticulate like they’re on fire. Withnail is charming in a way that glitters like a broken pane of glass, and very probably insane. He is very probably well on his way to alcoholism. He is also very probably a homosexual, and you won’t ask about that, either, because no one in their right mind would. You’re the man who’s spent every possible moment of the day in the company of that demented homosexual since you were admitted here. What does that make you? A sort of auxiliary homosexual? It’s not by choice; maybe at first, but he’s locked onto you like a magnet. You’re as good as trapped. If he is in the throes of some mental imbalance it manifests as naked daring. If he is some kind of sexual freak of nature, he’s hardly the first ever to attend Drama School.

You are admittedly a little taken with him, in a way that never, ever bubbles to the surface. Some upwardly-mobile, Waugh-ish thing, an immature first love that you’ll strip off like an old coat and discard once you find the right woman who will concede to marry an ostensibly promising actor with bad glasses and a bad suit. If Withnail isn’t a homosexual, and is in fact just a normal male with a pronounced dislike for female company and a penchant for drunken hand-clasping, you’ll be the one who’s made an embarrassing misjudgment. Really, it’s not Withnail you’re taken with, it’s something about what he represents: everything terrible and unprofitable about theatre that is nevertheless attractive, worthy, promising. It will pass. The acid charm of his enthusiasm will wear off and you’ll have a perfectly good drinking partner and nothing more. A peer, a competitor, if even that. Withnail is too hostile to come off like a wit of the Oscar Wilde sort, too energetic to infect you with a reputation of effeminacy by proxy. It doesn’t matter what sex he noisily disdains sleeping with. He’s the funniest man you’ve ever known here, and the only one who treats you like you actually exist outside of monologues and coursework. Withnail is already more than experienced. He is erudite, and has connections. He is genuinely devoted to the craft, if not its study. He has a future.

When he suggests you rent a flat together at year’s end, you’re going to say yes.