Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Writer’s block

The Last Cigarette <br /> Trafalgar Studio Rookery Nook <br /> Menier

issue 09 May 2009

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.

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