Review Details

Sir Richard Eyre made a welcome return to the theatre last week too, with his staging of The Last Cigarette: an adaptation of the late Simon Gray's wonderfully rambling Smoking Diaries and his last journal, Coda, in which he confronted his lung cancer. Eyre's production is splendidly fluid and full of humorous life. Having Gray played in triplicate – by Nicholas Le Prevost, Jasper Britton and Felicity Kendal – means the author can chat and quarrel with himself, and the trio can multi-task as everyone from his parents to Harold Pinter to preening doctors. Le Prevost is outstandingly droll, morphing into a smug chipmunk of a consultant, though Kendal can be excessively perky. I missed the touching one-to-one intimacy of the books, but this is also a poignant memento mori. Gray's hangdog face floats in the pitch black above the stage: a wraith-like image in monochrome that keeps melting, like smoke, back into the darkness.