I cannot recall any London audience giving the lead actor in a play the spontaneous, standing ovation that they awarded Peter O'Toole for his astonishing performance as Jeffrey Bernard.
Such displays are normally reserved for musicals, in which troops of first nighters have put their money, hearts, relations and lovers. But last night's rare, rapturous audience appreciation struck me as the real thing. A rumpled Peter O'Toole wears the role, shaped into theatrical form by Keith Waterhouse from Bernard's own journalistic writings, as if it were a second skin. His mood of sardonic melancholia rises to Beckettian heights.
O'Toole, of course, some time ago first immersed himself in Jeffrey Bernard. The actor played the journalist, a chronicler of his own anarchic life and alcoholic times in 1989 and hardly stopped until 1991. But in those days Bernard, though sometimes unwell and unable to write his confessional Spectator column, was at least alive and kicking against the pricks - he even named some of them. Now that he's dead though, thanks to lashings of alcohol and diabetes, O'Toole's performance and the play itself have taken on a darker, deeper air of rumination.
Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell has become a theatrical obituary, looking back upon the infirm pleasures of Soho, vodka, girls and betting and forward to a date with death. The scene is Soho's Coach and Horses pub, for which designer John Gunter has conceived inwardly tilting walls, which look like the figments of a drunkard's imagination and as though they might any time collapse upon the sole, locked-in inhabitant.
O'Toole's Bernard, accidentally trapped there after closing time, suffers a dark night of the soul and memory. His walk is a nice complex of a shuffle, shamble and stagger. Chain-smoking, he totters gamely around. His face remains as inscrutable as a code, his eyes are hooded and O'Toole's voice, now an instrument of infinite, expressive variety, brings Bernard's complaining tones back to life with a light comic touch. Figures from the past - too swiftly introduced and dispatched in Ned Sherrin's over-flippant, revue-style production - spark the reminiscence and fire his wit and comedy: doggedly Bernard goes where the odd erection leads him.
Bernard's humour springs from his original take upon life as the mistake he daily made, and a sport to dispel thoughts of mortality. The first, over-long half, despite the jokes that O'Toole lobs with such casual neatness in our direction, is a rambling voyage around "the enchanted dung-heap of Soho" and his drinking, racing world. The informal cat-racing though, which takes place when the weather is too cold for horses and tempts Bernard to bet and become involved in suspected cat-doping, is sheer delight.
The second half, however, becomes a tense and intense struggle over mortality. O'Toole has surely never achieved anything better on stage than in his sardonic evocation of a resigned Bernard drifting towards his end. The laughter keeps being cut off by the jab of sadness and regret O'Toole induces. So here, he exclaims, is the Suicide Coach to Beachy Head, "Book Now to Avoid Disappointment". His delivery makes me long to see him trying Beckett again.
This tremendous,virtual solo show,with four actors in efficient support, is a stark tour de force and feat of memory in which O'Toole transmutes Bernard's life of disappointment and difficulty into high, dark comedy.
Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell
