Skip to main content

Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell

Theatre Royal, Glasgow
3 stars
What, one wonders, would the late Jeffrey Bernard have made of the
internet age? The image of Fleet Street's original legend in his own
somewhat extended lunchtime and old soak in residence of Soho
hostelries blogging from the corner of his sainted Coach and Horses
while necking several large vodkas is an appealing one. Whether this
would mean Bernard would meet his deadlines at last instead of having
his byline perennially appended with the immortal 'is unwell' is
another thing entirely. In lieu of such a scenario, Keith Waterhouse's
affectionate 1989 homage to this spectacular gambler, drunk, ladies man
and scoundrel is probably the nearest we'll get to such dispatches.

Traditionally a vehicle for well-preserved leading men of a certain
age, Waterhouse's play here finds a twinkly-eyed Robert Powell stepping
into our hero's crumpled suit and coming to in the now locked bar he
calls home at 5am. Fuelled by enough double measures to fell an
elephant, Bernard sifts through his back pages of booze-soaked
anecdotes and proceeds to unfurl an unreconstructed litany on
mortality, manhood and the loss of both. This is illustrated in David
Grindley's production by a quartet of cameo actors putting flesh on
Bernard's deadly one-liners. Even Waterhouse himself, another Fleet
Street warhorse, gets his neb in.

But behind the self-mythologising lies a sadness to Bernard's wilful
self-destruction that we never quite get to the heart of in a play that
is essentially an old pal's act that prefers to see its subject's
roaring boy's rake's progress through rose-tinted optics. Waterhouse's,
and indeed Powell's Bernard, then, is an irresistible relic still worth
toasting.

The Herald, June 1st 2011

ends
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) 1. THE STONE ROSES    Don’t Stop ( Silvertone   ORE   1989) The trip didn’t quite start here for what sounds like Waterfall played backwards on The Stone Roses’ era-defining eponymous debut album, but it sounds
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug
2 comments
Read more

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h
Post a Comment
Read more