THE SMOKING DIARES by Simon Gray

WRITING WAS MY FRIEND SIMON’S ADDICTION

Director Richard Eyre pays tribute to the hard-drinking dramatist Simon Gray, whose brilliant diaries are being brought to the stage.

I'm currently rehearsing a production of a play called The Last Cigarette  based on the last two volumes of The Smoking Diaries by Simon Gray. It was written by Simon in the last year of his life in partnership with fellow playwright and friend, Hugh Whitemore. This is how The Smoking Diaries begins:

"So here I am, two hours into my sixty-sixth year. From now on I'm entitled to certain benefits, or so I gather - a state pension of so many pounds a week, free travel on public transport, reduced fee on the railways. I assume I'm also entitled to subsidiary benefits  - respectful attention when I speak, unfailing assistance when I stumble or lurch, an absence of registration when I do the things I've been doing more and more frequently lately, but have struggled to keep under wraps - belching, farting, dribbling, wheezing. I can do all these things publicy now, in a spirit of mutual acceptance."

The diaries end  in the fourth volume, Coda - when he is  given a reprieve  from a sentence of  death from cancer: "Two whole years!" Sadly, the prognosis was over-optimistic;  he died, not of a cancer but of an aneurysm, a few months later, in August of last year.

Simon Gray was a prolific playwright whose plays contain (or restrain) characters whose emotions spill out in a prodigal disorder within an ascetic, classical form. His tone is sharp, his politics unregenerate, his central characters often rumpled wrecks poisoning themselves with booze and cigarettes. His canon is enormous: behind it lies a kind of ghost-play, the cast of which appears in one play after another, swapping roles, suits and moustaches like an overworked repertory company. There are, or appear to be, two leading men, one a flamboyant, clever, sexually exploitative show off. He exasperates his wife, he disappoints his mistresses, he skives at work. There's an opposite figure, at times a diligent family man, more often an obvious loser He's sometimes a brother, sometimes a childhood friend.

Homosexuality is a constant theme, but it never erupts between the louche authorial figure and the prissy one. More to the point is the awkward closeness between two heterosexual Englishmen whose friendship is based on the fact that they were lovers as boys. His best plays - Butley and Otherwise Engaged - were huge successes in London and New York.

According to Simon the plays always started with a scrap of dialogue - "a character in a room says something, and I hope someone else will say something". It was hard graft from then on.  He wrote and rewrote until it stopped being painful, sometimes up to 40 drafts.

In the intervals between plays he wrote prose. He started writing his four-volume late-in-life meditation on mortality – The Smoking Diaries -  because, he said, he was "going through a bad patch and I needed something to keep myself going”. Having been forced  by ill health to give up alcohol and struggle to give smoking, writing was an addiction that he couldn’t overcome.

In The Smoking Diaries he turned his mordant intelligence to an audit of his life: an attempt to assess who and why he was as he was and if he loved who he thought he loved - parents, friends, early lovers, a fellow schoolboy. It's a testament to a life lived neither wisely nor well, with a heroic and often comic defiance of piousness, self-pity and political correctness underscored by a view of the world that would be tragic if it weren't so manifestly comic.

The remarkable thing about The Smoking Diaries is that they're never infected by the pompous, Pooterish tone that affects any conversation with oneself. It's partly Simon's self-knowledge - there's always self-mockery or self-condemnation and often self-disgust, and the last laugh is always on himself - but mostly it's his scorching honesty. He never defends himself by evasion or self justification, and under all his confession lies a stream of drollery, through which shines a tender love for his wife, Victoria.

The Smoking Diaries is the literary equivalent of the way in which thoughts come unbidden into your mind when you're lying half awake in the early morning or drifting unmoored during the day. They're not like his plays in form or in content but for all that they're no less plays. They're monologues for a not-quite-solipsistic, sometimes bitter, often loving, amiable, humane, vulnerable, intelligent, droll, melancholy,  curmudgeonly, protagonist called Simon Gray.

Plot is provided by the successive renunciations of alcohol and nicotine - and the prospect of renouncing life itself.

He achieves spontaneity with an artlessness that's supremely artful, using the present tense as if memories and the act of recording them occurred simultaneously. It's writing like Matisse's drawing, the pen not leaving the paper.

Like stage directions, he informs us where the act of writing is taking place, often on planes ("I'm only going on like this because we're on the verge of taking off"), at his desk in Holland Park, in hotel rooms in Barbados or Athens or New York. The scene is always set: weather, architecture, furniture, supporting cast. Then, like an actor tackling a long soliloquy, he fills his lungs (ironic for a would-be ex-smoker) and words fly out of him as if he had discovered the secret of circular breathing.

If you imagine that adapting The Last Cigarette for the theatre promises a dismal chronicle of despair, then you will be unprepared for a play that defies reverence, offers consolation with its wit as much as its poignancy, and affirms life as much as it fears the loss of it. You will also be unprepared for a play that is populated by plural Simon Grays played by Nicholas Le Prevost, Jasper Britton and Felicity Kendal. Yes, Felicity Kendal. Why? You'll have to see it to find out