Why should Keith Waterhouse's play about a famous alcoholic columnist still keep us entertained, and even moved, 10 years on? It's partly, of course, because of Peter O'Toole's hypnotic performance; but also because the play itself is a strange mix of interrupted Beckettian monologue and affectionate memoir to a dying Soho.
The Beckett parallels are certainly there. The play is a kind of Waiting for Norman, or even Jeff's Last Krapp, in which the eponymous hero, locked in the Coach and Horses overnight, passes the dawn hours reviewing his gloriously mis-spent life. Trained by his mother to be an officer and a gentleman, he has turned into a rogue and vagabond who has spent the years drinking, gambling, womanising before eventually reaching his apotheosis as a soul-baring Spectator columnist.
The play is packed with funny stories but running through it you also feel the loneliness of the long-distance drinker; and when O'Toole finally picks up his suitcase and carrier-bag in quivering hands, he resembles nothing so much as Beckett's Lucky without the halter.
But Waterhouse's script also turns Bernard's musings into a paean to a departed Soho. It's not just that we get a roll-call of familiar names such as Dylan Thomas, Francis Bacon, John Minton and Muriel Belcher. The play also affectionately re calls an "enchanted dung heap" full of artists, actors, publicans and sinners who viewed life through the bottom of a glass lightly. Bernard himself emerges as a wholly urban figure who, in occasional excursions to the country, discovers that "all those trees and all that grass drain the spirit". And the play celebrates the idea of Soho as a low-life village before the entrepreneurs, restaurateurs and advertising men moved in.
It may occasionally romanticise its hero and its setting. But O'Toole's performance remains an extraordinary mix of transubstantiation and technique. He drapes his long, lean body over bar stools like a Dali clock. He clamps his hand round a glass like an iron claw. But what amazes one is the breath-control that permits him to start each baroque sentence on a high note and then let the voice trail away like a wisp of smoke. Above all, he conveys Bernard's sense of absurdity and awareness that "this interval on earth might be just a bit of nonsense".
Royce Mills, Timothy Ackroyd, Sarah Berger and Annabel Leventon, as they did a decade ago, provide selfless support under Ned Sherrin's judiciously understated direction. But, although there is always a risk in reviving an old hit, it works. Jeffrey Bernard my now be dead rather than unwell and Soho may have irrevocably changed but the play remains an uncanny evocation of a sozzled, homeless Peter Pan who was always one of life's lost boys.
