The Stage

The Last Cigarette

Published Wednesday 18 March 2009 at 12:10 by Mark Shenton

All writers put themselves into their work, and Simon Gray’s plays - often inhabiting a narrow world of Cambridge educated, literary academia - were regularly based around his own experiences. His best subject did indeed turn out to be himself - not so much in the plays themselves but in the series of deeply revealing diaries he wrote.

They were first written about productions of several of the plays that are among the best books I know about the theatrical process; then around his own life, culminating in a painfully brilliant account of his inexorable journey towards death, after his 60-a-day cigarette habit finally catches up on him (as it did for both of his parents, as well).

Now, less than a year on from his death last August, his penultimate personal diary The Last Cigarette has undergone a reversal of Gray’s usual process of turning his plays into books about them to instead be a book that has become a play. It’s not an altogether comfortable fit: the opinionated streams of consciousness that fly so effortlessly off the page become a bit more strenuous to dramatise, and Gray - working before his death with fellow playwright Hugh Whitemore to do so - has edited it for three actors to embody him simultaneously in a device that’s clever but also distancing.

On the one hand, it allows him to have conversations with himself - and introduce other characters, like his wife, brother, nurses and doctors - to converse with as well. And it also means that three fine actors are given the chance for bravura performances, by turns combining high comedy and eventual tragedy. Nicholas Le Prevost is the most Gray-like, and is the most moving as he confronts the awful inevitability of where the story is going, Felicity Kendal employs her husky tones to good effect as Gray, but is otherwise more successful at embodying his wife Victoria or a Barbadian nurse with literary ambitions, and Jasper Britton is a treat impersonating Gray’s longtime friend and professional collaborator, Harold Pinter.

But though Richard Eyre’s production - with Gray’s office replicated in triplicate in Rob Howell’s design - fluidly dovetails the different characters and moods, you ultimately feel more intimately connected with Gray when he’s a solitary voice on the page, not competing with several other versions of himself on a stage.