Jonathan Salway has quite a pedigree as an actor. He has studied acting at the Drama Studio in London and at the University of California. Over the last few decades he has appeared in a number of films and television programmes, and has appeared on stage in the West End, and in productions for the Royal Shakespeare Company. He also founded the Moscow English Theatre (MET), originally based in Moscow but now operating out of the U.K.
I Wish I Was Mick Jagger is presented under the MET banner.
The show is delivered as a monologue on a sparsely lit, empty stage with only a wooden chair and a suitcase as props.
The main premise is a well-worn one, but one that should have universal appeal. The protagonist, Alan, is a middle-aged, middle-class white man struggling to accept that he has missed his chance to make any significant impact upon the world. Subsequently, he has to work through his disappointments and ultimately recalibrate his world perspective and his attitude in order to achieve a ‘there’s no place like Kansas’ moment.
The fact that Alan works through these issues to a point of satisfactory resolution in just a few days is hard to accept – it takes a lot of ordinary people years to be at peace with their own life’s choices – but upon reflection, at the end of this show, it is plain to see how Alan achieves this. It is because his character is actually a very shallow one.
Returning to his family home in Dartford after the death of his father, ostensibly to pack up his parents belongings and ready the house for sale, Alan becomes overwhelmed by grief which manifests itself as regret at the roads he has not taken in his life.
This regret is personified by the idealised form of Mick Jagger, another Dartford boy who attended the same school as Alan had as a youngster, but who had risen above his humble beginnings and achieved wealth and fame on a scale almost impossible for Alan to comprehend.
Alan wants to know why he had not been given access to the same path to success as the rock superstar had followed – especially as he had achieved more ‘A’ levels at school than had Jagger.
Following Alan’s exploits as he walks the streets of his old home town to visit Jagger’s childhood abode and his and Keith Richards’ statues in the town square, and then and then onto a High Street pub crawl with his old friend, Dave, we see him grow steadily more disillusioned and upset about the inequalities that life randomly deals out.
It is very British play, and some of the specific references to behaviour, situations, and even in its use of retail brand names, may obfuscate communication of the universal themes at the play’s core for some.
But there is a much greater problem evident in this play.
Salway strives to have us recognise something of ourselves in Alan, so we can affirm our own ordinary lives as being satisfyingly meaningful at play’s end, but ultimately he fails in this endeavour because the character he has drawn is far too flawed and, ultimately, is actually unlikeable.
Alan is married with a young daughter, he is employed as a teacher and is twenty years Mick Jagger’s junior. And, as the action begins on Jagger’s eightieth birthday, that makes Alan about sixty years of age. An age where some wisdom has surely been gained, particularly working in an occupation where there are clear unequivocal parameters for behaviour.
Yet, during the pub crawl we are asked to turn a blind eye to his moral transgressions and sympathise with him as he ignores the sensible objections of his old friend Dave and pathetically tries to ‘chat up’ young women forty years younger than him.
He even consciously sets out to knock a drink over one women’s dress so he can attempt to wipe the spilt liquid from her breasts, hoping to re-enact Jagger’s behaviour when he first met one of his former wives.
It plays like a heavily watered down scene from Wake In Fright, where the thin veneer of civilised male behaviour is quickly dismantled and the more brutish character at the core is exposed. In that sixty year old Australian story, the male protagonist has to confront the truth about himself and there is no hiding from it.
In this play, though, we are asked to forgive Alan’s boorishly abhorrent behaviour by excusing it as grief, or simply a result of alcoholic excess. In 2024, a depiction of a male behaving like this should be as the precursor to some form of moral comeuppance for Alan, or even some punitive response from the law. That is not the case here, however. Instead, we are expected to benignly accept that a simple text from his wife and a sweet phone call from his young daughter serve as his chastisement and wipe the slate clean.
It is a throwback to the neat endings that we would expect in much of the theatre and cinema of decades ago and seems jarringly out of place now.
I am sure this was not Salway’s finest performance but, on this night, he was hesitant in the delivery of some of the material, seemingly struggling, at times, to remember what came next. He over-emphasised the frequent weaving of Stones’ song titles in the monologue, as if waiting for the ‘boom-tish!’ punctuation of a drum to occur to underscore the reference’s cleverness. His physical movement also seemed awkward and self-conscious on many occasions.
On another night, the performance may well be smoother and hence more convincing, but the fact still remains, despite the intended thematic pay-off of this show being a worthwhile and meaningful one, that the material it employs to achieve this is totally out of synch with the times, making it extremely hard to empathise with the protagonist.
It was clear that not everybody in attendance agreed with my opinion and as the audience left the performance space a number of people could be heard enthusiastically expressing how much they had enjoyed the show!