It’s early in the morning. With several coughs and splutters, Jeffrey Bernard rises unsteadily from the pub seat where he has been kipping out for the night, and heads for the vodka bottle behind the bar.

To say that Bernard is a regular at the Coach and Horses, Greek Street, Soho, would be a considerable understatement: he has, he tells us, no other home to go to. Keith Waterhouse’s 1989 play Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell was first produced while its real-life subject was still alive.

Bernard apparently revelled in the notoriety the play brought him, as did Coach and Horses landlord for 63 years, Norman Balon. The play charts Bernard’s progress through a life of sponging (“I’m putting these on the slate,” he tells us artfully as he pours another vodka), sex (four wives), betting, poker, and yet more sex (innumerable affairs). Work? That was journalism, where Bernard survived a series of sackings, and ended up with the long running Low Life column in the Spectator — Sporting Life, he tells us indignantly, got rid of him for “inappropriate behaviour at a point-to-point dinner”.

As Bernard holds forth, a series of subsidiary characters flit in and out, brilliantly played by a team of four, Mark Hadfield, Peter Bramhill, Amy Hall, and Rebecca Lacey. There are ex-wives (one of them so tearful that her mascara is running down her face), tax inspectors, assorted pub bores, and the legendary, short-skirted Muriel, mine hostess of the Colony Room, another of Bernard’s haunts. But the danger is that Bernard might become a giant economy-size pub bore himself, in a show that is basically a two-and-a-half hour monologue. Robert Powell, in the title role, never runs the slightest risk of this. An actor with a tremendous range, he combines his straight dramatic and comedy skills to create a Bernard who is always fascinating, even lovable. Wearing a woozy smile, and with eyes that don’t always seem to be quite in focus, Powell identifies completely with his character.

So used to copious amounts of booze is his Bernard that his speech never becomes slurred — yet a certain unsteadiness of the gait as he crosses the bar is a telltale sign. Powell particularly relishes a scene in which Bernard (with a remarkably steady hand) performs a conjuring trick involving a raw egg and a bowl of water. It’s a high spot in this very fine revival (director David Grindley).

l Until Saturday. Tickets: 01865 305305 or online at www.oxfordplayhouse.com