I never realised there was a Felicity Kendal inside the late, lamented playwright Simon Gray, struggling to get out. But there she was, wearing beige trousers and blue shirt, in the role of Gray, or at least bits of him. For so voluminous a playwright it apparently required two men and one woman — a fraught Kendal together with the similarly dressed, superlative Nicholas Le Prevost and vigorous Jasper Britton — to bring Gray back to life.

Unfortunately, this trio do not represent different aspects of Gray’s intriguing, melancholic character. They simply share the lines in The Last Cigarette, the bleak, blackly comic adaptation of The Smoking Diaries and Gray’s cancer-laden book, Coda, which he had nearly completed at the time of his death, having enjoyed more than a little help from his friend Hugh Whitemore.

Some people rate Gray’s Diaries as the literary and creative best of him. These autobiographical streams, or rather waves of consciousness, immerse us in the life of a sardonic man, addicted to alcohol, cigarettes and writing plays, who even when dying found plenty to make us laugh about. Gray’s Diaries, though, are hell to dramatise. Rob Howell’s set, with three identical desks and piles of books, reminds us in what a word‑bound world we are. Richard Eyre’s inventive and stylish production animates the essentially static and conflict-free form of the adaptation, with atmospheric video projections, pools of light and George Fenton’s lyrical, foreboding music.

The chilling introduction, in which Gray depicts death as “a grinning man holding a knife”, gives way to an autobiographical patchwork of interminable, sometimes amusing, memories of his family of addicts —an adored younger brother boozing himself to an early death, his father smoking his way to cancerous oblivion.

The second, shorter half achieves a narrative form and musters a riveting emotional and comedic impact: Gray succumbs to lung cancer. He faces up to fear, creepy surgeons and catheters, wielded by Kendal’s hilarious Sister who nurses literary aspirations. On holiday he dreams of drowning himself and his sorrows. Patients with tubes in throats hanker for one last smoke. Le Prevost, who with his air of a ruminative dilapidated roué makes a terrific, mordant Gray, also flashes his teeth and rolls his shoulders as Gray’s sinister specialist: he hands him a short lifeline. Sadly it snaps.

Until April 11 (01243 781312).