Review: THE LAST LAUGH, Noël Coward Theatre

Spending as much time as I have in front of audiences, I’ve known the serotonin hit that comes with seeing people react to a joke or humorous aside, but only once have I got ‘A Laugh’. There was a beat followed by a low rumble, the unmistakable sound of strangers collectively laughing - it was exhilarating. I wanted more, but I didn’t have the ambition, the drive or the talent. It was merely a black swan. 

Paul Hendy’s The Last Laugh asks two key questions about ‘A Laugh’. How do you produce them? How do you control them (indeed, do you control the laugh or does the laugh control you)? It could be grounded in academic study (Freud got there with Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious), or possibly an example of the grim calculus exposed by explaining a gag. We’re spared by going down a different route. We’re invited to consider what might be termed ‘comedianning’, that is, the art and craft of being a comedian. And its soul, maybe especially, its soul.

Three of the greats are our guides - Tommy Cooper, Bob Monkhouse and Eric Morecambe.  

We meet Cooper first, the shambling mountain of a man, like so many in the pantheon of British comics, forged in the immediate aftermath of World War II. A natural clown, Cooper adds a sardonic wit to his schtick with the magic tricks, but is hitting the bottle too hard, the melancholy that was never far away curdling into something stronger. Damian Williams (like all three in the cast, he’s played his man before and it shows) treads a narrow line between pathos and caricature, but never loses sight of the single most important fact about Cooper - he was relentlessly funny.

Next Monkhouse arrives in the dressing room that is also a waiting room, Simon Cartwright uncanny in his inhabiting of the man, the gestures, the cadences of the speech, the carriage - it’s eerie. There’s the confidence, laced with a ever-present self-satisfaction that could overwhelm his unparalleled (for a Brit) technique with too creamy a smarm for some. The man is a technician, no clown, living or dying on how his words (etched in the famous books) are received by his audience. He has no parachute on stage, the gags the only means of support, the screen that blots out the tragedies in his private life.

The third into the room that is gaining a supernatural dimension is Morecambe: half a double act, half a clown; half a storyteller, half a set-up and punch merchant. Instantly recognisable 40 years after his death, self-described as ‘always on’, Bob Golding catches the energy of the man, his irresistible cajoling of anyone within earshot to laugh. I recall his guest appearance on ITV’s World of Sport, ostensibly to talk about his role at Luton Town FC, but he stayed on to terrorise the host, Dickie Davies, and (and this was most unusual in the regimented studios of the 70s) make the crew laugh continually, unprofessionally off-camera. 

These three character studies show us the price the men paid for their success, but they also show us how they did it, genius, as ever, one part God-given alchemy and two parts bloody hard work. The pacy 80 minutes is leavened by some of their greatest hits, the punchlines, the sketches and the songs that live forever in the hearts of those who saw them. Unlike so many biopics these days, we’re never in any doubt as to what made these men what they were, the focus never straying to wives, neuroses or an overlay of 21st century hot-button issues.

For some, the show (and it’s as much a show as it is a play) will be neither fish nor fowl. We don’t really get to the core of the characters behind the comics, we don’t really get full-on tribute acts for us to re-live what we missed Abba Voyage style and we don’t really get a thoroughgoing analysis of their place in comedy history, their influences, their legacies. Others, your reviewer included, say Thank God for that.

But we get plenty enough of those elements of their stories and a whole lot more. Above all else (as I’m sure the three would agree) we’re indulged in the incomparable pleasure, that greatest of therapies, the opportunity to sit in a room and laugh and laugh and laugh in commune with the men who sacrificed much for that rare, joyous and uniquely human(e) experience.       

The Last Laugh is at The Noel Coward Theatre until 22 March and then on tour

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