The Last Laugh at the Noel Coward Theatre review: gags, gurning, and a supremely lazy script

A Welshman, a Lancastrian and a bloke from Beckenham walk into a theatre dressing room in Paul Hendy’s ropey nostalgia-fest about three British comedy greats. The Last Laugh features impressive impersonations of Tommy Cooper, Eric Morecambe and Bob Monkhouse and generates easy chuckles from their old gags, gurning and bits of physical business.

But the script is one of the laziest I’ve come across in a long time, with the three men merely insulting and encouraging each other to do old routines by turns. There’s a flatulent attempt to explain what makes the likes of Cooper and Morecambe funny in their bones and Monkhouse a try-hard, and some obligatory sad-clown stuff. Hendy also directs, sluggishly.

The three men are a mismatched selection in many ways. It’s blindingly obvious that the theatre they’re in is a portal between life and death, underlined by Cooper’s mournful line: “If I died on stage, people would laugh.” While Cooper and Morecambe did indeed die on stage when relatively young (as did Sid James, whose picture is among many late comedians on the wall), Monkhouse passed away at home aged 75 after two years with prostate cancer.

Monkhouse and Cooper were unfaithful to their wives and Cooper a tight-fisted alcoholic, but Morecambe was happily married, much loved and merely smoked himself into a series of heart attacks. There are some truly cheap lines about the suicide of Monkhouse’s forgotten comedy partner Denis Goodwin, and about his disabled son. The play feels somewhat unfair to a man who worked fiercely hard at the craft of comedy, and who passed through a purgatory of naffness to find himself reappraised and respected by a new generation of comedians.

Of the three performances, Damian Williams’s is the most uncanny. He barely resembles Cooper but - dressed for most of the show in unflattering vest, pants and fez – manages to capture his ability to generate mirth even when doing nothing. Bob Golding has Morecambe’s springy physicality, baffled scowls and helium titter down pat but suffers from the fact that his comedy, alone among the three, relied on a straight man, Ernie Wise.

Simon Cartwright has clearly studied Monkhouse’s suavely measured body language and delivery but his performance feels like it’s been generated by an AI trained on half-speed episodes of Family Fortunes. Where Monkhouse had a smoothie-chops perma-tan, Cartwright’s head looks like it’s been lacquered.

Hendy admittedly knows his comedy history, with the onstage trio paying tribute to Max Miller, Sid Field, George Formby and others, and acknowledging the long tradition of stealing jokes. There are some old-favourite zingers: “Des O’Connor – a hard man to ignore. But worth the effort.” But mostly it’s just a chortling, smug, snoozefest, with moments of seriousness heavily flagged by flickering bulbs and the kind of “thoom” sound effect that usually accompanies a nuclear explosion in films.

To paraphrase one of Monkhouse’s best gags, that tellingly doesn’t make it into Hendy’s script: I laughed when I heard this play was coming to the West End. I’m not laughing now.

The Last Laugh at the Noel Coward Theatre, until 22 March, noelcowardtheatre.co.uk.