Tom Conti in Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell

Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, Keith Waterhouse’s play based on the life and writings of the late journalist, long-time Soho resident and celebrated alcoholic of the title, has returned to the West End. Peter O’Toole originally played the role in 1989, and Tom Conti succeeded him in the original run. The actor returns to the role at the Garrick Theatre, where it opened on 19 June. Did critics find Jeffrey Bernard unwell or in good health?

Here’s a sampling of what they had to say:

Mark Shenton in his Theatre.com Review: “Though I resisted it before, I surrendered more to the new revival that has just opened at the Garrick, thanks to a captivating performance by the genially crumpled Tom Conti, who brings a surprising gentleness, warmth and affection to the role that, with a knowing wink, an arched eyebrow and a shrug of the shoulders, seems to be at once inside the man but outside him, too… Conti, best known for his Oscar-nominated turn in Reuben Reuben and as Pauline Collins’ love interest in the film version of Shirley Valentine, is an inherently lovable actor, and with his dishevelled shock of graying hair and crumpled white shirt, is a genial guide around the contours of this damaged life that has an even greater poignancy now for the fact that he may have failed at many things, but succeeded in destroying himself.”

Benedict Nightingale of The London Times: “There’s laughter round every corner of Ned Sherrin’s production… But the play is also a nostalgic elegy: to dying Soho and to doomed Bernard. Consistently enough, Conti seems weary, bleary and drolly dishevelled. His hand shakes as he downs yet another vodka, his voice becomes a big, rueful shrug as he contemplates life’s absurdity. It’s a decent performance but not the great one his predecessor ended up giving. When O’Toole’s lonely, shattered Bernard picked up a battered suitcase and made for the pub door, you felt you were seeing a Beckett anti-hero half-trudging, half-tottering to his grave. Conti’s Bernard is still healthy and well-fed enough to be back tomorrow morning.”

Michael Billington of The Guardian: “Although Tom Conti gives a good, unsentimental performance as the boozing Bernard, it is hard to banish memories of Peter O'Toole who invested the role with a Beckettian melancholy… Conti emphasises the shaking hands, the permanent stumbles, the brusque put-downs to the reforming women in Bernard's shambolic life. Conti has moments when he makes the role definably his own: his strange anger, as a journalist, at never being offered a staff appointment and his gentle terrorising of the front-stalls as prepares to execute a famous pub-trick with an egg, a biscuit-lid and a glass of water. But Conti, for all his skill, never makes you warm to the old toper in the manner of his predecessor.”

Michael Coveney of The Independent: “The linen-suited Conti, hair ruffled in a too healthy-looking thatch, leads us through this with an oddly inappropriate amiability. Whereas O'Toole was aristocratic in his seediness, imperious in his misanthropy, creating a comic monster with a tragic dimension, Conti is more hapless and ingratiating. His hands shake like leaves on an autumnal tree, and his eyes are blackened with debauchery, but Conti seems to think he should play all this for sympathy. He does so very well, but he knobbles the show.”

Nicholas de Jongh of The Evening Standard: “Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell intermittently amuses in Ned Sherrin's spirited production, with its revealing of JB's witty turn of thought and phrase. It also makes me a bit angry. What a withering comment on our morally vacuous times it is that the one contemporary hack who has become a national figure and whose journalism has been given theatrical form is Bernard, a drunken columnist of few fixed, serious convictions, and not some great war correspondent or influential political commentator. How strange too, that people rain down contempt and anger upon pathetic, self-destructive drug addicts like Pete Doherty, but react in laughter and carefree amusement at the spectacle of Waterhouse's faithful portrayal of Bernard, destroying his body and life with daily overdoses of vodka… Conti's valiant, vigorous performance is not powered by the quality of exasperated desperation O'Toole achieved and which gave the show far more driving energy. For aficionados, though, Jeffrey Bernard is a bitter pill well worth swallowing.”