REVIEW: JEFFREY BERNARD IS UNWELL by Keith Waterhouse at Coach and Horses, Soho, until 26 February 2024

‘For London Pub Theatres, this is about as perfect as a play gets.’ ★★★★★

For London Pub Theatres, this is about as perfect as a play gets. Not only is it set in a pub and performed in a pub, but this outing for Keith Waterhouse’s paean to one of Fleet Street’s finest piss artists is staged in the very pub where Jeffrey Bernard really was quite frequently unwell. The Coach and Horses in Soho’s Greek Street has its own place in boozer mythology, rivalled only by the French House just down the street and round the corner.  A place immortalised by Private Eye, among others, as the epicentre of the pissed old hack meets artist, meets novelist, meets raconteur, none of them any too good for work after lunch in the days when lunch rarely involved anything solid.

Jeffrey Bernard, here played by a debonair and dissolute Robert Bathurst, was the doyen of journalistic drunkards, capable of knocking off his 1,000 words of funny, biting, sometimes savage column while shaking off last night’s hangover before this afternoon’s return match. And the play, by Bernard’s mate and drinking companion Keith Waterhouse, is as charming and funny as anything written in the 35 years since its debut, even as you sit there with a little bit of your puritan soul telling you this man must have been a nightmare to work with, live with, and, especially, for the four unfortunate women who said “I do”, be married to.

The staging couldn’t be more perfect – it’s the opposite of empty-space theatre, with Bathurst filling his glass from the vodka bottle behind the bar, that Bernard himself propped up of an afternoon and evening until he slid off one of its barstools. It’s immersive theatre in the sense that Bathurst simply emerges from behind the bar of the real pub, supposedly locked in alone at 5am after falling asleep in the toilets before closing time, to wander among an audience filling the comparatively cramped and very cosy space of a bar that’s so far survived four or five decades of modernising gentrification while outlining his rackety life and wicked, wicked ways.

And it’s hilarious from start to finish, with not a politically correct (it’s too old for ‘woke’) bone in its perfect construction. One-actor plays can suffer from monotony, one man delivering a long monologue, but that hazard is entirely avoided by having a charming actor simply talk casually to a table around their bottle of red here, a man nursing a solitary pint on his barstool over there.

Bathurst is charm personified in a perfect performance that feels entirely like a charismatic man saying whatever comes into his head rather than an actor remembering a 60-minute script. He has the knack, too, of capturing what it is that makes characters as monstrous as Bernard often was magnets for a bar full of people eager to hang on his every word. And what that quality was, was simply a zest for living, for living life to its fullest, however impecunious one might be, however irresponsible, however many deadlines missed, tax bills unpaid, and, I fear, people let down.

In its first incarnation back in the 1990s, the play was a massive hit, winning awards, and giving Peter O’Toole - himself no stranger to charming a bar and waking up the next morning with no idea where he was or whatever he’d done - a defining late-career stage role.  

For someone who started their career as a teenage cub reporter in 1982 and, after the morning’s induction, was in the pub by 12.30 on the first day with a pint of 80 Shilling, it’s also a glorious evocation of a lost era (though a glorious reminder, too, that I’d probably be dead by now if we’d carried that era on for very much longer).

Here it’s on a limited run, on odd nights throughout the month, and for an hour of chaotic, anarchic laughter in the dark. One of the hottest tickets in town if you can still get one. As good an hour’s entertainment as any pub will offer this year.

JEFFREY BERNARD IS UNWELL by Keith Waterhouse

Director: James Hillier

Coach and Horses, Greek Street, Soho   

4 - 26 February 2024

Box Office: https://www.jeffreyplay.com/

Reviewer David Weir’s plays include Confessional (Oran Mor, Glasgow), Better Together (Jack Studio, London). Those and others performed across Scotland, Wales and England, and in Australia, Canada, South Korea, Switzerland and Belgium. Awards include Write Now Festival prize, Constance Cox award, SCDA best depiction of Scottish life, and twice Bruntwood longlisted.