Acclaim For The Dream Of The Decade

By: Edward Victor
Submitted: 2007-01-17 16:42:00
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Like many writers and artists who frequented Soho's The Groucho Club and The Coach and Horses, Afshin Rattansi first met Jeffrey Bernard in the 1980s. A revival of the Keith Waterhouse play starring Tom Conti in which Bernard is the lead character, talking about life at the Coach has just opened in London's West End, coinciding with the announcement that Rattansi's novel "The Dream of the Decade" will be on sale at the bar.

The play is named after the line that often appeared in the UK's Spectator magazine where Bernard's column, "Low Life" would have appeared had Bernard not imbibed too much to complete his piece. Rattansi recalls Bernard explaining to him that he only drank to stay the pain of diabetes. "But on a particularly sunny Saturday morning in Groucho's, I asked why he wanted a Vodka Tonic as there was sugar in the Tonic. He told me that sugar in tonic was okay. He then proceeded to drink himself into a kind of coma."

The Dream of the Decade includes vignettes of characters that frequented Soho in the 1980s and is a quartet in one volume. It was Norman Balon the famous owner of the Coach and Horses up until a few weeks before the revival of the play who said the novel should be sold from behind the bar of the infamous tavern. The new owners of the rapidly changing pub say they will carry on the tradition. "The Dream of the Decade - The London Novels", which is officially to launch in the UK in the winter, is thus available at a special price in the most famous public house in London.

The play, often remembered as a one-man show but in fact packed with characters performed by a versatile suporting cast of four, was a highly successful vehicle for its original star Peter O'Toole, who appeared in the original run at the Apollo Theatre and in a later revival at the Old Vic. 'For the next three months, I'm going to be playing a smoker, a drinker, a womaniser and a gambler - all the good things in life,' says Tom Conti, who at 64 is a year younger than Bernard was when he died. But Conti looks in far ruder health. He has often hinted in the past that he and his wife of 38 years, actress Kara Wilson, have enjoyed an open marriage. There only daughter Nina, herself an actress, has said that both her father and mother had enjoyed 'a string of affairs' during their marriage.

'It is a gift of a role. Jeffrey was a one-off - great fun and a very likeable man. The last time I saw him was in Wheeler's restaurant in Soho and he looked as if he wasn't going to last the day. He was completely unrecognisable from the man I had met years previously. It was really quite scary.'

Another character in the novel, the owner of the Coach and Horses, Norman Balon, has just retired. Mr Balon, whose memoirs are titled You're Barred! You Bastards, worked at the Coach & Horses since 1943. The pub, which occupies a prime location at the corner of Greek Street and Romilly Street, provided inspiration for Bernard's Lowlife column in the Spectator until his death in 1997.

Bernard's antics at the Coach also inspired his friend, Keith Waterhouse, to write the play Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, based on a real incident when Bernard found himself locked in the pub overnight. Bernard was later portrayed in the play by Peter O'Toole, another Coach regular. But the pub is best known for its fort nightly Private Eye lunches at which the great and good are plied with cheap food and even cheaper wine in the hope they will be indiscreet. One of the more recent scalps was John Hemming, a new UK Liberal Democrat MP who confessed to getting his mistress pregnant last week after an Eye lunch.

Peter O'Toole was a perfect Bernard when he appeared in the 1989 premiere. He had been warned so many times of his own demise. And he responded by perfecting the look and manner of a very polite, but very insolent, ghost. As the New York Times has it, "he is theater through and through, as witness his apprentice years at the Bristol Old Vic when he did one of the great Hamlets, along with Chekhov, Beckett and John Osborne's Jimmy Porter, plus the dame in the theater's annual pantomime. And then, after he had yielded a goodly part of his interior to surgery, he came back on the London stage in 1989 in the play "Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell," a one-man show and a bow to being self-destructive, alcoholic but undefeated."

Bernard's life, as reconstructed in the play at least, is hardly inspiring or even particularly eventful. Dedicated to the pursuit of drink, gambling and sex, he stumbles from one minor crisis to another, each entirely of his own making. The highlights are incidents of child-like silliness, such as his involvement with a friend who runs a book on cat-races that he holds in the hall of his Battersea flat.

The script is littered with the type of anecdotes which would fall flat if told by lesser voices. A less successful raconteur would find himself mumbling, "It's funny if you're drunk," apologetically. The Waterhouse-O'Toole magic is to make them funny when you are stone cold sober.

Waterhouse's Bernard is a feckless, irresponsible and self-indulgent drunk, who lurches from one pointless bohemian distraction to another without a care in the world. He is also charming, loyal to his friends, generous of spirit, enormously witty, without malice or shallow media cynicism. The play is a hymn to a beautiful loser, a free spirit, enslaved by the spirits you pay for.

In the "Dream of the Decade" characters are the same even if thematically there are deeper historical resonances with changing British and U.S. culture and of how the media scene has changedas the newspaper barons of old gave way to big corporations. Rattansi began his career writing for the London Guardian newspaper, which informs the last novel in the volume, "Good Morning, Britain." The London of "Dream" is far more inclusive that Waterhouse's Bernard's London. And the bar in the second novel, "Reproach" is starker and colder than the Coach, famous for its literray, artistic and theatrical crowd.

Edward Victor represents Afshin Rattansi, whose novel "The Dream of the Decade" is available at Amazon.com.

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