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The Last Cigarette
By Simon Gray
Granta Books £14 99
312 pages
Dateline: 20th May, 2008
The latest instalment in Simon Gray's Smoking Diaries is worth
buying for its insightful view into the making of a Broadway show that
fails to take off.
The first 200 pages feature the musings and meanderings of a man close
to spanning three score years and ten and, if not desperate to give
up smoking, at least mildly interested in the prospect.
Much of the time, he writes about the holidays that he is enjoying
in Suffolk and on the Greek island of Spetse. The first two thirds of
the book does little apart from giving an idea of the thought processes
behind one of the major playwrights of his generation, particularly
the way in which he will take a seemingly uninteresting subject and
work around it, inventing ideas or moving it on to somewhere completely
different. This ability is clearly behind the genesis of his characters
and plays.
By that point, you feel that you know Simon Gray (and his wife Victoria)
incredibly well and possibly rather better than you would really wish
to, having discovered about his eating, smoking and childhood toilet
habits as well as the deep frustrations and great pleasures of his life.
At long last, we get to the section covering the New York revival of
his semi-autobiographical play, Butley. The show was a real hit
when performed at the Huntington Theatre in Boston. Three years on,
once again with Nathan Lane in the lead, it is to be produced at the
Booth Theatre in a city where these days it often seems that straight
plays can only be produced by Brits and even then, far more flop than
manage long runs.
Gray spends a hundred pages walking us through a playwright's view
of the business from early rehearsals past opening night and more importantly,
Ben Brantley's damning review in the New York Times, which effectively
ensured that the play would struggle to run on into the New Year.
Despite his reluctance to discuss the topic, the writer's comparison
of the man who created this part, Alan Bates, and its new star, Nathan
Lane, is absolutely fascinating. It is really a shame that it is not
possible to see Lane playing the seedy Oxbridge academic after reading
this book with its pointers to what makes him so good in the role.
Philip Fisher
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