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• Robert Powell as Jeffrey Bernard


role. That title, of course, is a witty wordplay on Jacques Brel is Alive and Well – And Living in Paris - the title of the musical production featuring the songs of Jacques Brel that celebrated his work after his death. Waterhouse paraphrased that as Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell and Still Living in London (later shortened to the current title) and made the play’s eponymous hero a British boozer rather than a Belgian balladeer. The play’s simple plot finds the journalist trapped


overnight in his favourite Soho pub, from which entirely likely premise Waterhouse was able to use Bernard’s own anecdotes from his Spectator columns as the basis of the play. A host of ex-wives and friends, plus equally as many frustrated and fuming editors, pub landlords and restaurant managers, join him in revisiting scenes from a life packed with hysterical and absurd incidents. The whole of the small cast are superb throughout – in


particular Powell in the title role. His relaxed and natural delivery personified what I imagine must have been the unflappable humour of the man himself – usually wry and self-deprecating but with shafts of cutting wit occasionally slicing through. Powell was as entertaining and believable on stage as Peter


O’Toole was on screen...and as entertaining as Bernard himself undoubtedly was in real life. In fact, after watching Robert Powell’s personification, I came away feeling that somehow I now knew what it would have been like to spend an evening drinking with Jeffrey Bernard in the Soho


of the 1950s. And finally, because you must surely be wondering, I should tell you that Bernard was still alive in 1989 when the play premiered...although he definitely wasn’t too well. Despite diabetes, pancreatitis and renal failure – all caused


by the demon drink – he lived until 1997, at which time he was 66 years old. In fact, it was his own decision to suspend the dialysis that was keeping him alive, just so that he could live whatever time he had left in the way he had always lived his life. And if you think that was a life wasted, I’d bet money that Jeffrey Bernard wouldn’t agree with you!


n Theatres in the area Find out whatʼs going on at a theatre near you


• Oxford Playhouse - www.oxfordplayhouse.com • Oxford New Theatre - www.newtheatreoxford.org.uk • Royal and Derngate - www.royalandderngate.co.uk • Royal Spa Centre - www.warwickdc.gov.uk/ royalspacentre • Milton Keynes Theatre - www.ambassadortickets. com/Milton-Keynes-Theatre


With Bruce Cox 75


Four Shires THEATRE


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