Review of Robert Bathurst in an immersive version of the play in Soho's Coach And Horses

It’s a one-man show, but it has two stars. Cold Feet’s Robert Bathurst exudes a roguish charm as the rakish, if permanently pissed, journalist Jeffrey Bernard –  yet he must share top billing with the venue: the legendary Coach and Horses pub in Soho, where the real-life columnist drank away his days with London’s other outsiders and misfits. 

Writer Keith Waterhouse set his comic play here when it was first performed in a West End theatre in 1989. Now we are in our anti-hero’s actual haunt, where we find him locked in overnight having fallen asleep in the gents and missed the call of ‘last orders’ from the pub’s legendarily grouchy landlord, Norman Balon.

So he wanders the premises, weaving among the audience, occasionally grabbing a top-up from the vodka bottle in the optics, monologuing about his life as a wastrel who become Britain’s most notorious, or celebrated, drunk. He was lured to post-war Soho, the ‘enchanted dungheap’ as he called it, at least according to this script, and became not just enamoured by its sleazy glamour, but an integral part of it.

His, artistic circle included the likes of Dylan Thomas, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud as well as the seedier characters, criminals and layabouts similarly drawn to the neighbourhood. A similar rogues’ gallery can be found in the other world he loved to immerse himself in, horse-racing. Not for nothing was Bernard’s Spectator column – memorably described as ‘a suicide note in weekly instalments’ – called Low Life.

The play – cut down to an hour for this performance, with the original supporting cast jettisoned, replaced by answerphone messages that hobble the momentum – is a misty-eyed celebration of this louche scene. Unsurprising, really, as Waterhouse was part of it, too, and this is his bitter-sweet love letter to a bohemian Soho that was already fading in the 1980s, and is utterly replaced now.

Indeed, Bathurst first performed this play here four years ago in protest at a corporate takeover of the pub. An unsuccessful protest as it happens, as the Coach and Horses is now owned by Fullers – although they have – so far – had to good sense to preserve its simple, rough-around-the-edges  interior.

It’s not just the era that is seen through rose-tinted spectacles. Bernard is portrayed sympathetically, too, as an irascible bon vivant, celebrated for his independence of spirit and witty conversation – and, yes, rough around the edges too. But he is also a character of his times. Today, I think, he’d be seen less as a lovable rough diamond as a rather pathetic alcoholic, and we might be less keen to forgive his nastier behaviour, especially towards the women who encountered him.

The play does not overlook the damage Bernard’s dependency wreaked on his health, nor the fractious relationship with his ex-wives. Bathurst brings a poignancy to these sections, hinting at the self-loathing behind such destructive behaviour, even though the text never fully grasps this nettle.

For it is the anecdotes, the pub tricks and the witty aperçus that make the night, and which Bathurst – following in the footsteps of Peter O’Toole, Tom Conti and John Hurt in this role – delivers with appealingly craggy urbanity (although on this early performance he’s still rusty on sone of the lines).

The witty stories and bon mots keep flying. When he’s asked why he drinks so much, he quips that it’s ‘to stop me from jogging’; he recalls a street con trick being performed with triplets rather than the customary playing cards, and recreates a cat race to sate the gambling addiction at a time when the racecourses were closed. 

These stories are a delight, all the more amusing for being up close and personal, and perhaps we should be grateful we don’t have to endure the real Barnard to get to them, only his rather more convivial ghost.

• Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell is on at the Coach And Horses until November 21. Tickets

Review date: 31 Oct 2023
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett