It was the opening night of Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell at The Coach & Horses pub in Soho last night. The play first ran in 1989, and is now showing at the very pub where Bernard spent the majority of his waking hours.
Aside from propping up the bar at the Coach, Bernard wrote a legendary weekly column, Low Life, for The Spectator in the seventies and eighties. It detailed Bernard’s exploits around Soho, alongside luminaries of the age like Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, and Dylan Thomas, who also happened to be his drinking partners.
Bernard was as much a wordsmith as he was an alcoholic. When he was too drunk to file, The Spectator would run the note “Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell”, giving the play its title.
He is played this time around by actor Robert Bathurst, who told us that the one-man show was “a celebration of Bernard when he was relatively sober”. Bathurst feels there is a magic to performing in the Coach & Horses. “He was on that stool, he was on that square bit of lino, he was in that toilet when he fell asleep.” But performing the play in the pub is not without its difficulties. Bathurst is constantly having to weave around the audience’s chairs, and in an earlier run of the play, the pub’s cat wandered onto the stage and refused to move.
The play stitches together the best anecdotes from Bernard’s column, including waking up one night in the Groucho Club, thinking he had gone blind. It turns out he had fallen asleep face down in a plate of turbot, and had got tartare sauce in his eyes.
Throughout the play, Bathurst seems to be necking neat vodka, which he pours from a Smirnoff bottle behind the bar. Is this true method acting? “Imagine doing that!” he laughs. “I’ve got two shows today.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the vodka is water. “I work from the words on the page and then go from there, so I don’t need to do a pub crawl in order to be able to do this job,” Bathurst says.
Ahead of the show, Bathurst wrote a trigger warning on his Twitter, saying “the play has references to Smoking, Gambling, Alcohol and Sex.” Viewers who may be offended should probably look elsewhere: “that’s all the show is about, really,” he told us, adding that it was all a bit of fun, “joining in with the cacophony of trigger warnings that we’re faced with on every single show nowadays”.
In today’s climate, we wonder if a foul mouthed, cantankerous yet loveable soak like Jeffrey Bernard would have a column. “People still drink, people still have addiction, people do substances all the time,” says Bathurst. “Jeffrey spent his life damned if he was going to be told what to do. And I think that freedom of spirit was something that a lot of people probably do still share.”
