Rather than the dreary wallowing one would expect from a play whose message is effectively 'Smoking kills, let's look a bit closer', Simon Gray's stage adaptation of his own diaries, The Last Cigarette - co-written with playwright Hugh Whitemore - is "a candid account of an addictive personality" (The Guardian). The biggest compliment", said The Telegraph, "is that it feels genuinely like a play rather than a dressed-up recital". The wit, warmth, pain and panic are all present on stage at the Trafalgar Studios, underlined and - strangely - energised by Gray's cancer - his "grinning man with a knife" who hovers over his thoughts. Perhaps because Gray's voice comes to us posthumously (he died last summer) does it have an even greater edge of wry truth, but this is his last cigarette after all and he's going to enjoy it, even though the three actors playing him insist on puffing on thin air rather than taking desperate, nicotine-inhaling drags. Yet Jasper Britton, Felicity Kendall and Nicholas Le Prevost offer "a spontaneity and freshness" (The Telegraph) that lifts Gray out of his diary.
(Image: Felicity Kendall)
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Rather than the dreary wallowing one would expect from a play whose message is effectively 'Smoking kills, let's look a bit closer', Simon Gray's stage adaptation of his own diaries, The Last Cigarette - co-written with playwright Hugh Whitemore - is "a candid account of an addictive personality" (The Guardian). The biggest compliment", said The Telegraph, "is that it feels genuinely like a play rather than a dressed-up recital". The wit, warmth, pain and panic are all present on stage at the 
