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New Moon is nothing if not an international advertisement for the hungry virtues of virginity and young people can’t get enough of it
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Theatre
A smart, prickly and rewarding view of sexual and emotional confusion
Cock
Restaurants
Kitchen W8 is a bargain for this area, if such sophistication is what you crave
Kitchen W8
Too long and drawn out but very entertaining with excellent special effects
This is a peculiar play and does not work for me. Some of it is very funny but there are real flaws
Alex has a strong powerful voice and was faultless, she is far better now than she was on the X-Factor
London,
Nicholas de Jongh's rating
Reader rating
Lighting up time: Jasper Britton, Felicity Kendal and Nicholas Le Prevost celebrate Simon Gray’s nicotine addiction
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).
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
