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.