To old Fleet Street hands like Keith Waterhouse, memorial services are nearly all that's left.

A good send-off for a valued colleague, you see, is an excuse to recall a time when things were better; when work was something you did between drinking and when life was regulated only by a barman calling time. "Let's head for El Vino's. It's what Sam would have wanted."

Sam, in Waterhouse's new play, is Sam Pepper, fictitious editor of a fictitious tabloid, who has died leaving Penelope Keith widowed with a large house and an unfamiliar northern accent.

Sam was 59, three stone overweight and on 60 fags a day. We know this because his last instruction to his wife was to compile a diary of her feelings as she coped with her grief. This she reads to us.

As the play opens, the memorial service has just ended. "Dear Diary, got oop, grieved," intones the widow, though the accent is scarcely necessary for the part.

The first half of the play is virtually a monologue for Miss Keith as she relays the personal and professional characteristics of her late husband. "Why did they invent sliced bread that won't fit in the bloody toaster?"

However, unlike Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, Waterhouse's previous stage dissection of a wayward journalist, Good Grief is concerned with the onward life of those who are left behind. In particular, the fragile relationship between Miss Keith and her stepdaughter Pauline (Sarah Berger) is considered, as is the widow's burgeoning friendship with a man in the pub she barely knows. Old Sam, it seems, is intent on coming between all of them, even from whichever final resting place Fleet Street hacks inhabit.

The highlight of the piece comes towards the interval, when Miss Keith, a veritable Mary Poppins among comediennes, is called on to utter something quite out of character. As ever, the appreciative noise of a Yorkshire audience so assaulted is almost musical.

None of Sam's post-mortal emotional choreography is ultimately of much consequence, though the construction and staging is such that it's hugely satisfying to watch.

Ned Sherrin, who also collaborated with Waterhouse on Jeffrey Bernard, directs with customary lan a play which runs at the Alhambra until Saturday, en route to London.

David Behrens

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.