How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, Soho Theatre, London

It is not enough that I should succeed, as Gore Vidal once said; others must fail. And it is true that Toby Young, ex-Modern Review editor, ex-Vanity Fair writer, ex-Evening Standard columnist, satisfied many of his peers with that string of exes in front of his job descriptions. Strangely, over the years I worked with him, he was never anything other than civil and considerate with me, so my desire for his failure was only of the most abstract and disinterested kind, of the sort I unmaliciously hold for even my favourite colleagues.

It is not enough that I should succeed, as Gore Vidal once said; others must fail. And it is true that Toby Young, ex-Modern Review editor, ex-Vanity Fair writer, ex-Evening Standard columnist, satisfied many of his peers with that string of exes in front of his job descriptions. Strangely, over the years I worked with him, he was never anything other than civil and considerate with me, so my desire for his failure was only of the most abstract and disinterested kind, of the sort I unmaliciously hold for even my favourite colleagues.

As we all now know, he turned his catastrophe to his advantage by wallowing in it in How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, and the book became a bestseller, damn it. Even I thought it was good, and said so in print. Believe me, if it hadn't been, I would have been delighted to announce the fact.

And now it is a one-man play (adapted by Tim Fountain). Here's another funny thing: I have known all the three hacks who have had plays staged about them – Young, Julie Burchill, and Jeffrey Bernard. So I can understand why I might be interested in seeing their lives filleted and enacted, but I can't quite understand why you might. Still, the other two were successes, and if they were, then I can't see why this one shouldn't be either.

Although Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell wasn't strictly speaking a one-hander, Julie Burchill's drama very much was; but while that play was staged in an opulent and accurate depiction of her Brighton pad, here the stage is as aggressively minimalist as the starkest interior of the 1980s. Which is fitting, as Young (like Burchill) loves to tease the well-meaning by declaring his fondness for that decade. You have a table, a laptop, a bottle of mineral water, a mobile phone – and that's it. Just Jack Davenport strutting and fretting across the stage for nearly an hour to hold your attention.

Which he does, remarkably. Whittling a book down so much means abandoning almost all of its depth – but that's understandable. You don't want any play to drag, but particularly not a one-man show. And once one has got over the shock of noticing that Jack Davenport is not only considerably better-looking than Young, and has refused to lose his hair for the part, the lack of visual distraction works, at times even suggesting that the whole business is a grisly private nightmare. (The absence of other cast members in this kind of show is also, I suspect, an accidental nod to the solipsistic egoism of their heroes.)

Anyway, briskly and tirelessly, Davenport takes us through the whole sorry saga of Young's stay in New York. For those not familiar with the book, it begins with a call from Graydon Carter, the awesomely powerful editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, inviting Young to join the team. Young promptly, and then reliably, screws up at every turn. Every rotten idea he suggests is scorned. "It's a dog whistle, Toby. You can hear it, but I can't." The only pitch that succeeds is Young's idea about "Cool Britannia", and he even messes that up, partly thanks to the disrespectful antics of Damien Hirst and the gang. Young becomes increasingly marginalised, his feature ideas more desperate, his sexual shortcomings exposed, his hopes destroyed. (Rather cleverly, Davenport's stubble turns grey and shabby at the moment of Young's being fired. A lighting trick, I suppose, but a good one.) How, I wonder, could anyone fail to find this funny? I saw this on the press night, which is always tough for a comedy, as critics consider laughter a sign of weakness; but Young must have offended at least half the audience there at some point, and I suspect he owes money to a good many of the rest – but still they laughed. As for Davenport's performance, it's so fluid and achieved that you don't realise until afterwards how good it was. The only thing missing is a coda alluding to Young's remarkable recovery from the abyss. But that would spoil the joke.

'How to Lose Friends and Alienate People': Soho, London W1 (020 7478 0100), to 17 May