REVIEW: The Last Laugh revives comedy greats with affection & nostalgia

Paul Hendy’s gently meandering but appealing play imagines three comedy greats sharing a dressing room they apparently never shared in real life, having a conversation you probably can’t imagine them ever actually having.

Not that that matters… because what we get is a beautiful portrait of Tommy Cooper, Eric Morecambe and Bob Monkhouse, delivered with great comic skill and huge affection.

And if you’ve got your wits about you, you might even work out what the set-up actually is.

But along the way the three of them sit and chat and discuss everything, from joke set-up to joke delivery, from comedy antecedents to current comedy interactions, from being solo to working as one half of a double act, from the use of silence to the fear of it, from the huge rewards of a guffawing laugh from the audience to the massive sacrifices all three of them have made along the way.

The point is that these are three such contrasting comedians. Monkhouse is the absolute analyst, the honer and the polisher of jokes, Morecambe has got all the mannerisms, and Cooper is just naturally funny in everything he does.

Simon Cartwright is absolutely uncanny as Bob Monkhouse, capturing perfectly the one you would imagine would be the hardest of the three. He has absolutely got the voice. Steve Royle is not far behind as Morecambe, very cleverly not overdoing all the quirks that made Morecambe Morecambe but delivering the man behind the glasses. Damian Williams as Tommy Cooper probably comes closest to caricature, but then that’s probably what Tommy Cooper was – and it’s an impressive performance.

The conversation wanders endlessly with plenty of jokes thrown in so awful that you sit there desperately trying to commit them to memory. Maybe most interesting of all is when they each attempt to deliver the same joke in their vastly different ways.

Most interesting of all, that is, until the ending which … well, maybe you saw it coming. Clever and suitably elegiac for an evening of pure nostalgia.

Then came the interval. And then came the Q&A. And during the interval it was awfully easy to wish that the Q&A wasn’t going to happen.

Surely it would have been better to leave it there, to let a piece so touching settle in our minds, to let the memories deepen.

But when the actors, understudy Richard Hodder and writer and director Paul Hendy took to the stage for the start of the second half, it immediately felt the right thing to do, their sheer love of the characters they had just revived shining through outstandingly. Interesting questions and interesting answers rounded the night off nicely.