Synopsis An award-winning comedy based on the life and writings of talented Spectator columnist and notorious alcoholic Jeffrey Bernard about friendship, failure and coming to terms with life. In a life devoted to stylish self-destruction, an unrepentant gambler, fervent drinker and serial womaniser, Bernard publicised his very individual philosophy on vodka, women and racecourses to hilarious effect. From a bar stool in this favourite Soho pub, the raffish writer entertains us with a stream of hilarious anecdotes, and nostalgically regales tales of other Soho characters that have gone the way of the demon drink!
Tom Conti (pictured) wittily recounts drunken tales as he recreates his title performance in Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, which opened on Monday (19 June 2006, previews from 12 June), for a limited 12-week season at the West End’s Garrick Theatre (See News, 12 May 2006).
Keith Waterhouse’s play is based around the recollections of the late Spectator writer Jeffrey Bernard, a legend in the bohemian London district of Soho, notorious for his womanising, gambling and drinking in the Coach and Horses pub.
Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell was last seen in the West End in a sell-out eight-week season at the Old Vic where Peter O'Toole had another go in the title role he had originated in 1989 at the Apollo Theatre, where Conti succeeded him. Ned Sherrin, who has directed all of the previous West End seasons of the play, directs again. This is Conti’s third time tackling the title role. He’s joined in the cast by Royce Mills, Elizabeth Payne, Tristan Gemmill and Nina Young.
While most still found Waterhouse’s play amusing, if dated, overnight critics inevitably held Conti’s more likeable performance up against Peter O’Toole’s original characterisation and some found it wanting by comparison.
Michael Coveney on Whatsonstage.com - “Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell is set in the preferred Soho haunt of the old rogue, the Coach and Horses pub, lovingly reproduced on a tipsy angle by designer John Gunter: faded panelling, well-worn red leatherette stools and benches, cartoons on the wall. Jeff awakes from a bacchanalian slumber in the small hours of the morning. He’s locked in. Cue a lurch towards the vodka bottle, and a rambling trip down memory lane by the original Grumpy Old Man.” Coveney felt that Conti “plays Jeff for sympathy, something O’Toole never did. He winks at the audience. He ruffles his imposing thatch of grey black hair… He wants too much to be liked… This is, nonetheless, an immensely skilful performance, and Ned Sherrin’s production preserves the perfect vaudevillian tawdriness of his own original work.” He added: “With O’Toole, there was an ineradicable dignity to all this, and a tragic dimension to his creation of a classic English eccentric, one of the greatest comic characters of our day. Conti, entertaining and likeable, gives an expert guided tour of the premises.”
Benedict Nightingale in The Times - “Pity Tom Conti, who last night tackled the role O’Toole unequivocally made his own, first in 1989 and twice in the 1990s — and inevitably came off a gallant second best… It’s a decent performance but not the great one his predecessor ended up giving… The play is essentially a monologue packed with reminiscence, anecdotes and wry rumination, though Royce Mills, Elizabeth Payne, Tristan Gemmill and Nina Young do put in appearances as drinking cronies, accusing wives and even Lester Piggott and Francis Bacon.” Nevertheless, said Nightingagle, “there’s laughter round every corner of Ned Sherrin’s production.”
Michael Billington in the Guardian - “Timing in art is everything; and one can only wonder at the wisdom of reviving, 17 years on, Keith Waterhouse's loving tribute to a Soho legend. And, although Tom Conti gives a good, unsentimental performance as the boozing Bernard, it is hard to banish memories of Peter O'Toole who invested the role with a Beckettian melancholy… Waterhouse craftily uses a quick-sketch format to show the promiscuous strangeness of Bernard's life and some of the items still make one laugh. But the play is also a paean to the ‘enchanted dungheap’ of Soho and one can't help feeling it is steeped in wistful romanticism… Conti has moments when he makes the role definably his own: his strange anger, as a journalist, at never being offered a staff appointment and his gentle terrorising of the front-stalls as prepares to execute a famous pub-trick with an egg, a biscuit-lid and a glass of water. But Conti, for all his skill, never makes you warm to the old toper in the manner of his predecessor. Ned Sherrin's production makes you feel the play has been reheated rather than genuinely rethought.”
Nicholas de Jongh in the Evening Standard - “This autobiographical, meandering, dipsomaniac stream of consciousness show, which famously premiered in 1989, returns Tom Conti to the title role he suavely took over from Peter O'Toole. With the tousled, morose look of a shaggy-haired dog left out in the rain, a shambling gait and a lugubrious voice that sounds as pickled as a herring, Conti again revels in Bernard's inspissated gloom, clumsiness and eagerness to cast himself as a life-victim.” As far as De Jongh is concerned, the play “intermittently amuses in Ned Sherrin's spirited production” but “also makes me a bit angry. What a withering comment on our morally vacuous times it is that the one contemporary hack who has become a national figure and whose journalism has been given theatrical form is Bernard, a drunken columnist of few fixed, serious convictions, and not some great war correspondent or influential political commentator.” In the title role, “Conti's valiant, vigorous performance is not powered by the quality of exasperated desperation O'Toole achieved and which gave the show far more driving energy.” Still, De Jongh concluded, “Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell is a bitter pill well worth swallowing.”
Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph - “First time around, I adored this show. I was a trainee alcoholic myself, and Bernard was one of my heroes, a heroic boozer who turned in matchless copy, a tipsy walker on the wild side who transformed personal disaster into some of the funniest columns in British journalism. Revisiting the show now, after coming within an ace of wrecking my own life with alcohol, I find my reactions are rather different. For a start, I don't believe that Bernard was nearly as attractive as Waterhouse portrays him… I suspect Bernard, like most chronic drunks, was selfish, emotionally illiterate, vile-tempered and prone to panic attacks and dreadful depression. The portrait of alcoholism on offer here, full of tipsy hilarity and comic incident, is a seductive lie… While O'Toole appeared to be basing his performance on lived experience, the abstemious Conti, who followed O'Toole into the play the first time around, is clearly putting on a highly skilful act. He brilliantly captures the wary caution of the drunkard's gait, the slurred voice and the alcoholic tremor before the first few drinks of the day have been safely negotiated… But, with the play's hero not merely unwell but long since dead, the show now looks like a rather unseemly attempt to milk the cash cow one last time.”
Like “A A Gill is away” or “Martine McCutcheon is indisposed”, the explanatory legend that “Jeffrey Bernard is unwell” at the foot of somebody else’s column in the Spectator used to imply that, although the show must go on, it’s probably going on somewhere else.
Well, the play fashioned by Keith Waterhouse in 1989 from the scribblings of the absentee hack, now revived at the Garrick Theatre, suggests that the appearance of any column at all must have been a minor miracle. Bernard himself once asked anyone who knew what he was up to between 1960 and 1974 to get in touch - he had no idea himself.
Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell is set in the preferred Soho haunt of the old rogue, the Coach and Horses pub, lovingly reproduced on a tipsy angle by designer John Gunter: faded panelling, well-worn red leatherette stools and benches, cartoons on the wall. Jeff awakes from a bacchanalian slumber in the small hours of the morning. He’s locked in. Cue a lurch towards the vodka bottle, and a rambling trip down memory lane by the original Grumpy Old Man.
Peter O'Toole, a friend of Bernard’s, delivered a sensational impersonation originally, and was succeeded after three months by Tom Conti, who now revisits the role (other notable Bernards have been James Bolam and Dennis Waterman). O’Toole looked like Bernard, a ruined Adonis whose skin was turning green from alcohol consumption and who breathed in more cigarette smoke than he exhaled goodwill.
Conti could not be more different. For a start, he plays Jeff for sympathy, something O’Toole never did. He winks at the audience. He ruffles his imposing thatch of grey black hair. He emotes quietly to the swelling Mahler music that Dirk Bogarde expired to in Death in Venice. His eyes are blackened with tiredness and his clothes crumpled, sort of. But he does not suggest a figure of minatory, frightening ghostliness. He wants too much to be liked.
This is, nonetheless, an immensely skilful performance, and Ned Sherrin’s production preserves the perfect vaudevillian tawdriness of his own original work; he has even wheeled out Royce Mills, also from the original cast, as an eye-boggling selection of quick-change characters including an old actor drunker even than Bernard, the effete painter Francis Bacon, various jockeys and trainers and Waterhouse himself, spied in an advent calendar-style upper window in a chaotic apparition of tumultuous white hair and slurred speech.
Other roles are taken by Elizabeth Payne, Nina Young and Tristan Gemmill in a portrait of the dying Soho where Bernard was such a palpable emblem. He first went there, he says, when he was 13 and it had been a downhill struggle ever since. In those days, you could become drunk and homeless for less than a pound. A life of drink, disastrous relationships with women (he was married four times) and gambling was the constant background to short-stay jobs as a stage-hand, dishwasher, illegal bookmaker and writer.
With O’Toole, there was an ineradicable dignity to all this, and a tragic dimension to his creation of a classic English eccentric, one of the greatest comic characters of our day. Conti, entertaining and likeable, gives an expert guided tour of the premises.
I really enjoyed it; it was a great fun evening, even if you do suspect that the 'real' Jeffrey Bernard, as a long-time drunk, was unlikely to have been as amiable as the character portrayed. I felt the first half could have benefited from being 10 minutes shorter, as there seemed to be much of the same, really only the one joke repeated. But the second half more than made up for this, with Tom Conti really coming into his own, and 'playing' the audience. The trick with the egg and the biscuit tin lid was hugely enjoyable, I may even have to try that myself at some stage! So while there was no great amount of depth to the play, it was a very entertaining evening, with a wonderful, impish performance from the ever-likeable Conti. - 83.104.38.117)
27 Jun 06
A terrific insight into the eighties. Colourful characters like Mr Bernard are no longer around as we have become too politically correct. Tom Conti is superb as the acoholic journalist who has lived life to the full in more ways than one. Definitely one to see.
- 212.135.1.53)
16 Jun 06
I saw this in preview last night. I have only a vague memory of the BBC showing the Peter O'Toole version some years ago, so I couldn't recall much detail. The play is good - no story as such, more a rambling meander through Jeff Bernard's life, but it holds your attention through sharp character sketches & informed descriptions of seedy bohemian life in Soho long before 24 hour drinking licenses. Having said that, it could descend into a post-war docudrama if it didn't have a strong central character to deliver the material properly.
Tom Conti was on marvelous form. Playing an almost controlled drunk for 2 hours must be quite draining, but he managed to make it look quite natural, and he has loads of impish familiarity to make us sympathise with his character. (O'Toole was probably even more natural, but from what I read he had more practice with the real thing). The 4 supporting actors were mostly excellent too, especially Royce Mills, who could definately have been one of Bernard's drinking buddies, and his cat racing scam is a hoot. 4 of the 5 cast have played the piece before, which probably contributes to their slick delivery even in previews. Mr Conti also mentioned at the end that this is Ned Sherrin's 10th go at directing the play, which presumably means he has directed virtually every production of it in the UK.
The set was static throughout, since there is only one scene, but an inventive take on a traditional old London pub, only built by the guys in Disneland's cartoon section, ie with everything out of perspective. Lighting was used to good effect, and combined with an 'off stage' commentary box on an upper wall, brought some dynamics to the set.
All in all, a welcome revival of a very entertaining play, and a fitting memory to a man who, from his last year's columns in the Spectator, clearly had no regrets for the dissolute lifestyle he led. - 158.234.250.71)
Opened on 24 Apr 1889, funded by W.S. Gilbert. 675 seats. Bought from Andrew Lloyd Webber and now owned by Broadway producer Max Weitzenhoffer and Nica Burns.Society of London Theatre member.
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