MEMORIES OF A MAVERICK
It’s an immersive present, in that you just purchase a drink within the cramped saloon of the previous pub on Greek Street, discover a nook, and ideally fall into dialog with one other lone stranger. Then as the gang fills in and the bar clock exhibits 5 a.m, Robert Bathurst as Jeffrey Bernard lurches in ,sleepy and grumpy, saying he fell asleep drunk within the Gents and now’s locked in in a single day. For the subsequent hour he wanders round, attempting to ring the famously grumpy host Norman Balon and recounting the lengthy 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 that shall be there: on anybody night time I suppose a only a few could also be survivors who truly knew him, and my following technology has fond recollections each of the pub and Norman Balon’s grumpy landlordhood (it’s thought of prestigious to have been personally insulted by him, I used to be!). But additionally we keep in mind the full-length model of this Keith Waterhouse play about Jeffrey Bernard. It ran on the Old Vic in 1989, a number of years earlier than the person himself died. Peter O’Toole was forged, virtually too appropriately, within the title function.
And now a newer technology keep in mind 2019 , when this adaptation of the play right into a one-man, hour-long present ran within the Coach and Horses with Bathurst within the function, directed by James Hillier. It truly included on some Saturdays a midnight present adopted by a conventional “lock in” until 5 a.m.. There’s a satisfying defiance in Defibrillator having introduced it again now, on the far aspect of Covid and mid-inquiry. It helps to clean away these instances after we misplaced all sociabilities for lengthy unhappy months. Good to be again once more in a crowded pub: laughing, huggermugger, tipsily celebrating one chaotic, eventful, messy life and friendships, forging our personal.
We are additionally celebrating a misplaced idyll, irrecoverable as Lyonesse and probably as legendary more often than not: the gilded reminiscence of previous Soho. A spot the place, as Bernard places it, you possibly can flip up younger and drunk and alone with only a pound left, and discover firm and solace and a sort of poetry. He talks of the figures round him : Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon and No-Knickers Joyce, Muriel Fletcher on the Colony Club, poets and bookies and journalists and wasters and misfits, the policemen who arrested him for soliciting unlicensed bets after which invited him to their Christmas social gathering. He tells, illustrated with toy animals and viewers help, of a good friend who when racing was frozen off staged cat races in his lounge. At one level he rummages in his suitcase after being thrown out by yet one more girl; there are answerphone messages from these he dissatisfied or betrayed, and a snatch of opera as he remembers his job as a scene- shifter at Covent Garden. Sadlym very sadly, on this truncated model he does converse of how educated the stage crews had been in comparison with Radio 3, however doesn’t reproduce the second from the unique play when, as they hauled the flies collectively, one turned to him scornfully and stated “I”ve shat higher Rosenkavaliers”
But Bathurst does obtain – twice an evening, three days per week, so honour him – the well-known trick learnt from Waterhouse himself. The one involving a uncooked egg, a pint glass, a tin tray and a violent bash with a shoe. You must be drunk, he says, to do it. He managed it with out catastrophe the night time I went, and certainly will once more.
It makes hour, a breath from a much less cautiously selfconscious boho-artistic-journalistic period than our personal (today even the eccentrics have brokers to shine their picture). He pauses, in certainly one of his many hospitalizations , to speak about mortality, touchingly, for alcoholism loses its hilarity and glamour and it killed him. But the essence of the night is there in a birthday poem written by Elizabeth Smart, a good friend, the well-known creator 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’s at all times crucial.
Box workplace. Jeffreyplay.com
Next performances 5/6/7 and 12/13/14 and 19/20/21 November
Two performances every day at 8pm & 10pm
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