THEATRE
WILLIAM COOK
JEFFREY BERNARD IS UNWELL Coach & Horses, Soho, London
Anyone with any taste who read the Spectator between 1978 and 1997 would turn first to Jeffrey Bernard’s Low Life column, described by Jonathan Meades as ‘a suicide note in weekly instalments’.
By rights, Bernard’s column should have made miserable reading, coming from a part-time journalist and full-time alcoholic. His barstool dispatches from the Coach & Horses pub in Soho chronicled a lifetime of self-inflicted misfortune, including four failed marriages, a few legal mishaps and a string of sackings and missed deadlines – all brought on by what he called ‘the other woman’, aka the demon drink.
So why was he so entertaining? Partly because, like all good journalists, he had an eye for a good story. Partly because he wrote without any self-pity or regret. But above all because he wrote so well. Honed and polished by decades of tipsy repetition, his self-deprecating anecdotes rolled off the page. It was like reading a letter from an old friend.
Even so, in 1989, when Keith Waterhouse (not only a great playwright, but also a brilliant columnist, like Bernard) announced that he’d turned Low Life into a play, I thought it sounded like a daft idea. Static and self-referential, a less promising subject for the stage was hard to imagine.
How wrong I was. Waterhouse’s stagecraft was inspired. Bernard wakes from a drunken stupor to find himself imprisoned overnight inside a deserted Coach & Horses, having nodded off in the gents. Sensibly, he decides to make the most of this impromptu lock-in, downing a bottle of vodka (his favourite tipple) while regaling us with a litany of his favourite yarns.
What emerges is a supremely entertaining yet surprisingly tender portrait, of a man whose wilful self- destruction is a perverse form of rebellion – a refusal to submit to the life of quiet desperation to which most of us succumb: the nine-to-five; the suburban semi; the dutiful, frustrated spouse...
Of course it’s largely an illusion – as with most addicts, Bernard’s alcoholic life has its own drudgery and routine. But at least it contains some prospect of variety, if not salvation. As Bernard says, of his downhill struggle, ‘Starting from tomorrow, everything will be exactly the same’. I saw Peter O’Toole play Jeffrey Bernard and he was amazing – an uncannily accurate portrayal. Then I saw Tom Conti play him. He was completely different but just as good. Although O’Toole’s interpretation got more praise, Conti was even more impressive. He showed that Waterhouse’s play was more than mere mimicry and was a proper drama in its own right.
Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell – the title refers to the line that would appear in the Spectator when Bernard was too drunk to file – has since been played by numerous fine actors, including James Bolam and Denis Waterman. The latest is Robert Bathurst in a new(ish) adaptation by James Hillier. Has this eccentric entertainment stood the test of time?
Hillier also directs, and his big idea is to stage this play in the actual pub in which it’s set. On the whole, this works very well. It’s a bit uncomfortable, and the sight lines are a bit obscured, but it’s so intimate and atmospheric that this hardly matters. It’s like a séance. The only flaw is that Hillier has stripped the play down to a one-man show. The original play, though mainly a monologue, featured a small cast of supporting players, dramatising Bernard’s anecdotes. Without their lively presence, this drama feels more austere.
Bathurst’s portrayal is quite close to the Bernard I remember (as a tyro hack, I once interviewed him at the Groucho Club, over a largely liquid lunch), but this isn’t a shallow impersonation. Like Conti, he infuses the part with his own personality, and that’s what makes it live and breathe.
The elephant in the room is the horrific effect that booze had on Bernard’s health. When I met him, he was only 60 but looked 80. He died of the drink, minus a leg, aged just 65. Bernard shunned workaday convention, and there was something truly brave – almost heroic – about that. However, like many bohemians, he paid a heavy price.
Revisiting this fine play in my late fifties, I feel it seems a lot more melancholic than it did in my early twenties. As Bernard might have said, one’s too many and a hundred’s not enough.
