A GROUP of about 20 fresh-faced schoolboys watching a theatrical celebration of one of Britain's champion boozers made for an incongruous sight at the New Victoria Theatre, Woking.

Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, Keith Waterhouse's play based on the writings of that late dissolute columnist , hardly seems standard Eng. Lit material. And its gin-soaked tales of drinking, gambling and loving, recounted by Tom Conti as Bernard, would have undone about five terms' worth of health education lessons warning against the dangers of the Demon Drink.

Bernard, who died three years ago, lived the kind of caricature drunkard hack's life that would seem over the top if it weren't real. And during a riotous two hours, his friend and fellow columnist Waterhouse has selected some wonderful morsels from Bernard's Low Life columns, which (dis)graced The Spectator for many years.

Here we have tales of horse racing-starved punters turning instead to indoor cat-racing, assault by rubber plant, blinding by tartar sauce, waking up ON (not in) racecourses etc. etc.

The play, revived in the West End last year, won the 1990 Best Comedy award from the Evening Standard and it is not hard to see why. Virtually a one-hander - Conti's recollections and musings punctuated by four satellite actors playing gamblers, drinkers, ex-wives, judges, tax men, editors - the play is bursting with outrageous and inventive one-liners.

Take this one. When it was suggested Bernard might write his autobiography, he put an ad in The Spectator asking: "Can anyone remember what I was doing between 1960 and 1974?"

In the play - the title is based on the not infrequent Spectator editor's note explaining his columnist's absences - Bernard awakes drunk in his beloved Coach and Horses pub in his equally beloved Soho only to find he's locked in. An alcoholic's dream: a legal lock-in for one. With nothing else to do, the man in the crumpled white suit and askew neck-tie whiles away the time by sharing his reminiscences with the audience.

To those more familiar with Peter O'Toole in the lead role, Conti takes a little while to get used to. O'Toole's uncanny likeness to the late Bernard and their similar lifestyles made for a bit of casting never to be equalled. And Conti seems more apologetic, less commanding than O'Toole - but this could have as much to do with the contrasts between O'Toole's chiselled features and Conti's rounder, more boyish face. Soon these perhaps unfair comparisons are forgotten as Conti, with slurred speech and impeded mobility has the audience eating out of his hand, and the women giggling like incorrigible schoolgirls.

Conti, more than ably supported by Paul Chapman, Matt Devereaux, Elizabeth Payne and Stephanie Schonfield, paints a picture of a self-pitying drifter. Unable to hold down jobs, marriages and even his drink. A disgraced public shoolboy, Bernard was thrown out of the army before finding his spiritual home in Soho. After stints as bookies runners, builders navvies and a host of other casual low-life jobs, ended up writing was was dubbed "a suicide note in weekly parts" in his Spectator column. And what gems they were, harking back to a 1950s and 1960s Soho swimming with poets, prostitutes, artists and bookies, a collection of the Low Life he loved so much.

But the debauchery belies Bernard's melancholia and preoccupation with death. The frivolous tone is laced with bitter-sweet moments and if anyone ever thought a lifetime's boozing was any guarantee of happiness, they should have seen a TV documentary on Bernard a few years ago. A lonely and resigned figure confined to a wheelchair after having his gangrenous foot amputated.

James Bowman