On a recent Sunday evening, the Shaftesbury Theatre in Soho was packed to the gills with a crowd celebrating a dramatic tribute to a landlord: the best kind of landlord, the landlord of a pub. And not just any old pub, but the pub he ruled with an iron fist for 63 years until his retirement in 2006. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Norman Balon, sole proprietor of the legendary Coach and Horses. ‘London’s rudest landlord’, as he was known; it said so on the matchboxes.
On for one night only, Norman Balon – It’s All True was a play written by the person who took over the lease, Alastair Choat. It followed in the footsteps of Keith Waterhouse’s Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, which in 1989 established a precedent for West End plays set in this pub.
The pub itself has certainly been the stage for plenty of real-life drama. I first stepped warily into the Coach in 1984; I was 21.
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