Writer’s block

The Last Cigarette
Trafalgar Studio

Rookery Nook
Menier

Simon Gray’s twilight diaries may well be a prose masterpiece. That the stage adaptation hasn’t done them justice is a fact few want to admit. The ‘much-loved’ fallacy has descended over this production for understandable reasons. Gray was a darling of the theatre, and the cast — Felicity Kendal, Jasper Britton, Nicholas Le Prevost — are twinkly-eyed favourites from the national treasure trove. But even buckletloads of affection can’t disguise the mismatch between a meandering first-person narrative and the focused concision of the stage. Gray, a talented playwright, sidestepped the theatre and chose good old prose for his last testament. Strong hint there, I’d say. The triple-thick slices of introspective confession are best encountered, as originally intended, by solitary readers who can savour their genial melancholy, their arbitrary may-fly philosophy, and who can take the highly burnished, but apparently improvised, epistles at their own gentle pace and appreciate their rambling monumentality, their structured idleness, their crafted tension and sinuosity.

This adaptation goes some way to neutralising the undramatic features of the prose by spreading the narrator’s voice between three players. But still the show lacks direction. There are many detours, especially in the opening half, where we pay courtesy calls on Gray’s childhood in Canada, on his needy grandmother, his philandering father, his alcoholic brother, and on his best friends, the Pinters, who provide the odd comic treat. Gray, at his front door, mistakes the gossamer tread of Lady Antonia Fraser for the elephantine footfall of a uniformed bobby. In Act Two things improve as the theme of cancer emerges and the script acquires momentum and particularity. Nicholas Le Prevost pulls ahead of his colleagues and does a hilarious turn as the sadistic consultant who bullyingly reveals to Gray the death-row prognosis — ‘one year’ — that he desperately doesn’t want to hear.

As Gray sinks into his grave Ben Travers rises from his. At the Chocolate Factory Terry Johnson has attempted a courageous feat of necromancy. Rookery Nook (written in 1927) is set in a familiar Wodehousian world of capering toffs and marauding aunts. We’re at a country retreat in Somerset where loveable scallywags Clive and Gerald are surprised by the arrival of a distressed flapper who’s on the run from her mad Prussian stepfather. Can the gallant chaps prevent the pouting evacuee from being re-captured by the Kraut before their disapproving womenfolk stumble across the scam? The ramifications of this conundrum are elaborated over two hours of topsy-turvy hide-and-seek and though it’s amiable enough it won’t push a modern audience’s buttons. One can easily enough relax one’s incredulity and accept the play’s narrative improbabilities. What’s much harder is to assume an alternative morality, to don the ethical lenses of the 1920s bourgeoisie, to accept that authority resides with scowling matriarchs and frumpy maid-servants who must, on no account, be allowed to discover that an unchaperoned damsel, in borrowed pyjamas, is hiding in the scullery. Well, all right, with a huge mental effort one can assume those delicate prejudices but the exertion harms the play’s primary objective which is to usher one, as if by magic, into an alternative comic universe. I was reminded of a key guideline given to comedy writers. When conveying information dress it up with gags. Why? An audience that’s thinking isn’t laughing. And I was thinking, not laughing, throughout this dated confection. Or look at the parallel with vacuum cleaners which, not unlike sex farces, are intricate technical appliances designed to concentrate filth in one place for its easier elimination from the system. Would a vacuuming device from the 1920s satisfy us today? We might admire its quaint appearance, its primeval snorts and burps, and the foibles of its ancient operating mechanism but we wouldn’t dream of using it to do any vacuuming. The same applies to this pert, fetching, energetically performed, beautifully dressed, wonderfully designed and excellently lit relic from the archive. It looks charming, but it just won’t clean the rugs.