United Kingdom The Last Laugh: Palace Theatre, Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, 19.8.2025. (JPr)
Cast:
Eric Morecambe – Bob Golding
Tommy Cooper – Damian Williams
Bob Monkhouse – Simon Cartwright
Creatives:
Writer and Director – Paul Hendy
Set designer – Lee Newby
Lighting designer – Johanna Town
Sound designer – Callum Wills
Composer and Musical arranger – Ethan Lewis Maltby
Wigs designer – Craig Forrest-Thomas
Costume designer – Amy Chamberlain
I think your reaction to The Last Laugh might depend on whether you lived at any time through the so-called ‘golden age of British comedy’ believed to be the latter half of last century. If so, the faces adorning the back wall of the authentically seedy-looking backstage theatre dressing room (why it could even be the Palace Theatre itself?) would be of those you might recognise. They included comedy greats like Tony Hancock, Arthur Askey, Max Miller, Sid James and George Formby with quite a number of others of their ilk getting affectionately name-checked during Paul Hendy’s 80-minute play showing Tommy Cooper, Eric Morecambe and Bob Monkhouse seemingly coming together for a show. It was a rather more innocent time of entertainers who had honed their acts in working men’s clubs, variety theatres and cabaret proving to be genuinely funny people during careers lasting several decades. Now someone can become famous on TikTok in a few minutes but for many such as Cooper, Morecombe and Monkhouse nothing was handed to them on a plate and success was hard-won.
I am thinking of Dolly Parton’s famous quip ‘It costs a lot of money to look this cheap’, there was certainly a price to be paid for at least two – and perhaps all – the comedians featured in The Last Laugh. The pivotal moment of the three-hander is towards the end when a maudlin and reflective Eric Morecambe says ‘I know I’m funny, I know I can make people laugh, but that doesn’t mean I don’t wake up in the middle of the night worrying people aren’t going to laugh anymore. I mean I need laughter; we need laughter like a drug.’ (Monkhouse) ‘They say laughter is the best medicine.’ (Morecambe) ‘Unless you’ve got a heart condition then it’s beta-blockers. There’s nothing like getting a really big laugh though is there? … I can still remember a laugh Ern and I got in 1948. I can’t remember the theatre, can’t even remember the joke, I can remember the laugh though, still hear it now, still feel it, woof, like a wall of noise like a huge roar, it was like a tidal wave, it kept rolling and rolling and when it stopped do you know what I did.’ (Monkhouse) ‘Immediately went looking for another one’. (Morecambe) ‘Exactly, it’s what we do isn’t it? Constantly, constantly going after the next laugh, but what if the next joke isn’t as funny? What if the next laugh isn’t as big? What if the laughter stops all together? (Cooper) ‘I suppose it has to stop someday.’
For me this was when Paul Hendy’s play was at its best. What we saw had been developed for the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe Festival from a 2016 short film of the same name Hendy had written and directed which won a number of awards at film festivals and is available on YouTube. The same three performers Damian Williams (Tommy Cooper), Simon Cartwright (Bob Monkhouse) and Bob Golding (Eric Morecambe) feature throughout all these iterations of The Last Laugh.
Earlier in the play we learn how the each of the three had a different approach to comedy. Cooper’s lumbering bulk, awkwardness, lugubriousness and seeming ineptitude meant even standing still gazing into the audience, people started to laugh. Williams appearing first in his underpants (a sight difficult to forget) and oversized chicken feet (‘they smell fowl’) has us laughing too. Morecambe was also naturally funny though best with his onstage partner Ernie Wise – though I am sure he would have made it on his own – but they depended on great scriptwriters such as (first) Sid Green and Dick Hills and (later) Eddie Braben. It was ‘Sid and Dick’ who actually wrote the original ‘playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in right order’ sketch subsequently recreated – and now the stuff of legend – by Eric Morecambe and André Previn. Monkhouse (who Cartwright knew for 14 years after he appeared on Bob Says Opportunity Knocks) was possibly more analytical and ‘chiselled’ his one-liners to perfection and recorded them in voluminous joke books. To be honest Monkhouse hangs around like a bit of a spare part in the play but there is great poignancy when he remembers his former writing partner Denis Goodwin who – in the shadow of Monkhouse’s burgeoning success – committed suicide sometime after their split. Also, there was the sadness of Monkhouse’s eldest son, Gary, confined to a wheelchair (because of cerebral palsy). It is these moments I will take with me from the play rather than any of the frantic machine gun-like jokes, asides, funny business and songs. I believe George Formby was a hero to Morecambe and like him he played the ukulele in his younger days though I wonder if Morecambe ever sang ‘My Little Stick of Blackpool Rock’ as we hear him do here?
And there was my real issue with The Last Laugh: I was pleased to see it and enjoyed the post-interval Q&A with the actors (possibly more than the play itself). However, I could not suspend belief for a moment that any of the three – Williams, Golding or Cartwright – were Cooper, Morecambe or Monkhouse. The issue of ‘recreation’ or ‘impression’ was debated during the Q&A, but I had seen all three on TV numerous times, and Cooper and Morecambe live in their heydays, and The Last Laugh only shows an approximation of what made them so great. Was Cartwright deliberately giving Monkhouse a certain fragility due to the illness which ended his life since there was none of the overweening confidence that Monkhouse showed on TV. Also, that voice Cartwright employed sounded more Tony Blackburn or another old-time radio DJ called Keith Skues than Monkhouse in my opinion, sorry.
All three suffered somewhat premature deaths: Monkhouse from prostate cancer in 2003, Morecambe from a final heart attack in 1984 the same year as Cooper famously died whilst on the stage doing his act during a live TV broadcast (I was watching that night). There were intimations throughout The Last Laugh that both Cooper and Morecambe were unwell and eventually there is the realisation we are watching them [spoiler alert] in ‘God’s waiting room’ and they have joined the pantheon of those other dead stars on the back wall.
Of course, I highly recommend The Last Laugh to anyone interested in these comedy legends. Now after the West End and New York, the play is coming to the end of a fourteen-week tour with more dates to come next year.
Jim Pritchard
For more information about The Last Laugh click here.
Featured Image: Bob Golding (Eric Morecambe), Damian Williams (Tommy Cooper) and Simon Cartwright (Bob Monkhouse) © Pamela Raith