MEMORIES OF A MAVERICK
It’s an immersive show, in that you buy a drink in the cramped saloon of the old pub on Greek Street, find a corner, and ideally fall into conversation with another lone stranger. Then as the crowd fills in and the bar clock shows 5 a.m, Robert Bathurst as Jeffrey Bernard lurches in ,sleepy and grumpy, saying he fell asleep drunk in the Gents and now is locked in overnight. For the next hour he wanders around, trying to ring the famously grumpy host Norman Balon and recounting the long entertaining disgracefulness and comradeship of his life and Soho from the ’50s onward.
We’re paying tribute to the legendary journalist, wit, gambler, and alcoholic. There are layers of people who will be there: on any one night I suppose a very few may be survivors who actually knew him, and my following generation has fond memories both of the pub and Norman Balon’s grumpy landlordhood (it is considered prestigious to have been personally insulted by him, I was!). But also we remember the full-length version of this Keith Waterhouse play about Jeffrey Bernard. It ran at the Old Vic in 1989, a few years before the man himself died. Peter O’Toole was cast, almost too appropriately, in the title role.
And now a newer generation remember 2019 , when this adaptation of the play into a one-man, hour-long show ran in the Coach and Horses with Bathurst in the role, directed by James Hillier. It actually included on some Saturdays a midnight show followed by a traditional “lock in” till 5 a.m.. There’s a pleasing defiance in Defibrillator having brought it back now, on the far side of Covid and mid-inquiry. It helps to wash away those times when we lost all sociabilities for long sad months. Good to be back again in a crowded pub: laughing, huggermugger, tipsily celebrating one chaotic, eventful, messy life and friendships, forging our own.
We are also celebrating a lost idyll, irrecoverable as Lyonesse and possibly as mythical most of the time: the gilded memory of old Soho. A place where, as Bernard puts it, you could turn up young and drunk and alone with just a pound left, and find company and solace and a kind of poetry. He talks of the figures around him : Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon and No-Knickers Joyce, Muriel Fletcher at the Colony Club, poets and bookies and journalists and wasters and misfits, the policemen who arrested him for soliciting unlicensed bets and then invited him to their Christmas party. He tells, illustrated with toy animals and audience assistance, of a friend who when racing was frozen off staged cat races in his living room. At one point he rummages in his suitcase after being thrown out by yet another woman; there are answerphone messages from those he disappointed or betrayed, and a snatch of opera as he remembers his job as a scene- shifter at Covent Garden. Sadlym very sadly, in this truncated version he does speak of how knowledgeable the stage crews were compared to Radio 3, but doesn’t reproduce the moment from the original play when, as they hauled the flies together, one turned to him scornfully and said “I”ve shat better Rosenkavaliers”
But Bathurst does achieve – twice a night, three days a week, so honour him – the famous trick learnt from Waterhouse himself. The one involving a raw egg, a pint glass, a tin tray and a violent bash with a shoe. You have to be drunk, he says, to do it. He managed it without disaster the night I went, and surely will again.
It makes a good hour, a breath from a less cautiously selfconscious boho-artistic-journalistic era than our own (these days even the eccentrics have agents to polish their image). He pauses, in one of his many hospitalizations , to talk about mortality, touchingly, for alcoholism loses its hilarity and glamour and it killed him. But the essence of the evening is there in a birthday poem written by Elizabeth Smart, a friend, the famous author of “By Grand Central Station”.
“You’re never snide, and you never hurt, and you wouldn’t want to win on a doctored beast. And anyhow the least of your pleasures resides in paltry measures. So guard, great joker God, please guard this great Bernard…Let him be known for the prince of men he is, a master at taking ,out of himself and us, the piss”.
Something that is always necessary.
Box office. Jeffreyplay.com
Next performances 5/6/7 and 12/13/14 and 19/20/21 November
Two performances each day at 8pm & 10pm
theatreCat 