Whenever a new movie or stage adaptation of a book appears, an eternal debate begins, both amongst the audience as it comes out of the auditorium, and amongst the critics: is it as good as the book? At times, this does not matter so much: when the books have been regularly turned into movies for a long time in a simple assembly-line style, like in the case of the James Bond series, or when they are not very well-known and therefore the adaptation becomes, by default, the official version in the general culture, as exemplified by Dr Strangelove or Schindler’s List. But when the book is a celebrated classic and the author is particularly famous and admired, then the creators and producers of the adaptation can expect that they will be looked at and judged through the lenses of the original version.

Simon Gray is a well-loved figure. He is an extremely funny, extremely versatile, extremely clever author, who wrote extensively for radio, films, television, and of course for the stage. He also wrote a few novels, and, most relevant here, a series of free-flowing diaries that were published since the mid 1980s; The Last Cigarette is, originally, the title of the final volume of his trilogy The Smoking Diaries, and it was followed by his last memoir, Coda, published a few months after Gray died in August 2008, having smoked sixty cigarettes a day till the very end - in spite of his lung cancer. The diaries have always received very high praise, so the stage version, which premiered at the Minerva Theatre in Chichester last March and recently opened at the Trafalgar Studios, was always going to be held up against them. It is important to specify that Gray wanted this adaptation, and asked Hugh Whitemore to write it; he, in turn, only accepted at the condition that Gray was going to collaborate with him. According to Whitemore, the final result is ‘more Gray than Whitemore’; it is based on the Smoking Diaries trilogy but also, partly, on Coda.

Whitemore’s main innovation was to distribute the role of self-deprecating narrator and protagonist among three different Simons, played in this production by Jasper Britton, Felicity Kendal and Nicholas Le Prevost. On paper, this may sound unappealing, but on stage it actually works very well as a way to render the dynamic and un-lecturing, improvising style of the diaries; the three Simons are all on stage at the same time, with three identical desks covered in identical papers and three identical piles of books, all dressed in identical denim shirts and all pretending to light one cigarette after the other (one has to admit, though, that Gray himself would have probably not liked this faking, and asked for the actors to actually smoke, at least once or twice). I initially feared that they were going to represent three different stages of life, or three different aspects of Gray’s personality, but in fact, they work as a continuum, three equally important and audible elements of a tiny orchestra. They continue each other’s sentences, they turn the reconstruction of the past and the recollection of childhood and adolescence episodes into a collective effort, they correct and help each other out in refining the details, but they also fluidly become the other characters in Gray’s tale: his mother, his younger brother, his wife Victoria, his old friend Harold Pinter, the nurses and doctors he had to put up with (hilariously described, even when they are delivering a death sentence) for the last months of his life.

The first act starts and ends circularly, with the discovery of the lung cancer, powerfully visualised by Gray as a ‘grinning man holding a knife’ who is waiting for him, crouching in the corner, every time he comes home: a constant reminder, a constant terrifying presence - even if we now know that it was not the cancer that killed him in the end, but an aneurysm, a bitter ironical turn about which he would have probably have something sharp to say. This grinning man, the prospect of a certain death being not so far away, does not bring wisdom to Gray as much as an even fiercer, more passionate attachment to life. He becomes enraged with himself, in the second act, not for having smoked thousands of cigarettes, but ‘for being a creature that dies’. His lust for life pushes its way through the events; when he the prognosis turn out to be better than he expected, giving him ‘two whole years’ instead of the six months he was fearing, he is joyous. His capacity for self-irony is such that possibly the funniest moment of the evening arrives when, in hospital, he is forced to have a catheter inserted: ‘I screamed only once - but at length’.

Richard Eyre’s direction is appropriately lively and vivacious; the three actors manage to find, whether by insight or by practice, a brilliant rhythm in their exchanges and superimpositions. What emerges is not only Gray’s intelligence and cynicism, his capacity for a lucid gaze on reality, his sarcasm about modern life (‘we live in exceptionally stupid days’), but also, and most importantly, his compassion and his tenderness, and his desperate, carnal love for life.  This is an admirable result, given the easiness with which one of the two aspects could have been given priority to and hence completely swallowed the other. As it is admirable, in fact, that The Last Cigarette feels nothing like a reading of selected bits of the books, but like a play in its own right, conceived and produced to be performed, elastic enough to maintain the essential gut feeling of Gray’s memoirs and yet be an independent, distinct work.

Most reviews of this production insisted on the fact that it is quite good, yet not as good as the books. But this is not a useful way of looking at this or any other adaptation, first of all because it appears to offer a supposedly absolute judgement of the content, as if this could be purified from all those nasty context and medium factors. The experience of sitting in a public space watching live action and having only a couple of hours to absorb and be involved cannot be compared to that of sitting in an armchair in our rooms reading a four-volume memoir: as obvious as this may seem, it is most easily forgotten when you are confronted with a different version of something that you really really love and that you would like everybody to experience in the same way as you experienced it. This is a play, not an abridged version of the books. In order to make a better use of the dramatic options, it takes the risk of multiplying the narrators, and it is a risk that pays off; it is not the best theatrical production I have seen this year, but it is definitely one of the most touching and funniest ones.

Till 1 August 2009