The Last Cigarette

The "Last Cigarette" by Simon Gray and Hugh Whitemore is adapted from the former's book, "The Smoking Diaries". It was performed at the Minerva Theatre (Chichester Festival 2009)until April 11th, prior to a subsequent move to the West End.
The play is an autobiographical account by a writer blessed with acute observation, the ability to turn a telling phrase and the wit to make the onlooker laugh. Gray began the play himself but had to collaborate with his friend of forty years, Hugh Whitemore. Whitemore describes the collaboration as "tremendous fun" and that "Simon wrote like a jazz musician. He could improvise beautifully."
It was Whitemore that came up with the idea of portraying the narrator with two actors and an actress. This quickly establishes what a complex character with whom we are dealing. It also enables other people encountered in Simon Gray's life to be portrayed by these aspects of himself. This works beautifully as the script works in and out of remembered snatches of the past. Simon Gray would write through the night, go to bed at dawn and not rise until midday. The first half is devoted to the telling of his story and each scene is punctuated by the ritual lighting up of cigarettes by all three aspects of the writer simultaneously. The effect is clever and telling - and the health of the cast and the audience were never endangered at any time. The second half is more concerned with Gray's terminal cancer. its impact on him and the well meaning but clumsy attempts of the medical profession to deal with the condition.
The production is marvellously paced and the reference to jazz music is very apt. The voices and emotions of the three actors, Jasper Britton, Felicity Kendal and Nicholas Le Prevost, are beautifully tuned together under the direction of Sir Richard Eyre. We believe that they are all Simon Gray and we believe that they are the characters he meets in his life - Jasper Britton does a wonderful scene as Harold Pinter with Nicholas as Gray. In the second half Jasper takes on more and more of the role of Simon Gray as Nicholas plays the medical profession ( a brilliant impersonation of the "chipmunk" doctor which made the audience roar) and Felicity the supportive wife. At no point does it become maudlin or sentimental. We are told that this is a man who smoked sixty cigarettes a day for fifty years and not once does he ask us to pity him.: "it's about the experience of going along a path which we shall all have to take one day". In the hands of a writer and craftsman like Gray, that experience is not downbeat or depressing.
In the programme, Hugh Whitemore reflects, "Even now, when England are playing a test series against the West Indies, I still think that I must ring Simon to talk to him about the cricket and then I realise I can't."