Review: JEFFREY BERNARD IS UNWELL, Coach and Horses, Soho

Jeffrey Bernard is unwell? He might be tempted to channel his inner Spike and declare that “Jeffrey Bernard is very f***ing unwell”, having surprised himself by making it to state pension age before leaving us 26 years ago.

For those of us who would risk the wrath of Norman Balon in exchange for a pint and a sideways ogle at the dishevelled but still strikingly handsome man at the end of the bar, it’s hard not to see him still there. After all, the Coach and Horses pub looks much the same (Double Diamond advertised above the bar), it’s just everything else that’s changed. There’s always his Low Life columns from The Spectator to indulge in too, anthologised into two fittingly thin volumes, a body of work that is imitated often in these confessional days, but never equalled.

It was the 1987 episode of Arena that followed him through a day of dissolute despair and pleasure that brought him to a wider audience and Keith Waterhouse’s award-winning West End play that burnished the legend a couple of years later. I saw James Bolam in the role, but my father saw Peter O’Toole, as fine an example of obvious, but brilliant casting as one could hope to find. Yes, I am still envious.

This production is a different show, cut to 55 minutes, but thrillingly authentic, Robert Bathurst holding court in the actual Coach and Horses, generously refuelling from the optics as he reflects on a life lived lowly. Looking around, millennials were not represented on the chairs and stools, mercifully so, as that more judgmental generation would clutch their pearls and quail at some of the tales told.    

The rest of us could wallow in a world now gone as Bathurst, charisma on tap like the vodka, skewers the backbone of England types, cravat around neck, The Telegraph tucked under the arm and praises those who lived closer to the edge of polite society - the bookies, the boozers and the brasses. In the rolling tales, each drifting into the next, many told against himself (and the charge sheet is considerable, so he’s mining a rich seam) we learn so much more than we would from the smartphone pix on Insta that, in the 21st century, make such a life impossible to pursue.

There’s wit in the anecdotes of course, but there’s an underlying message too about the fleeting nature of life, the bad decisions made that cause genuine pain but from which recovery is possible and how one only really finds oneself in adversity, especially if self-inflicted. The number of laughs generated in the audience was matched by the number of nods. “Been there mate - got through it too. Not sure how.”

James Hillier’s production is a gem, all the more so because it fills you with that warm sensation that leads, no matter how one resists it, into statements like, “You had to be there”, almost as smugly satisfying as “I told you so” in the canon of things not to say out loud. You can LOL (as the young people say) though, and plenty did - as we should. Jeffrey himself would be the first to point out that life, even a low one, is just too short not to.        

Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell at the Coach and Horses, Greek Street on selected dates until 21 November 

Photo Credits: Tom Howard

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