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• The Last Cigarette at the Chichester Theatre, review  

Addiction is a subject Gray knew all about. I believe posterity will come to recognise the four volumes of The Smoking Diaries as his masterpiece.

Gray's descriptions of his heroic devotion to cigarettes, the horribly inevitable diagnosis of lung cancer, and his determination to look back on his life with ruthless honesty even as he describes the panic and humiliation of terminal illness, are all blessed with a startling mixture of comedy and candour that can only be described as heroic.

Often cryingly funny, The Smoking Diaries are also intensely moving . . .

It also seems downright cowardly that they mime smoking their cigarettes rather than taking actual drags on real, sparked-up Silk Cut. There's a price to be paid in every job and the price to be paid for appearing in The Last Cigarette ought to be that you actually have to smoke the bloody things.

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