Direct from a sell-out run at Edinburgh Fringe Festival, The Last Laugh is a brand-new laugh-a-minute play which re-imagines the lives of three of Britain's all-time greatest comedy heroes – Tommy Cooper, Eric Morecambe and Bob Monkhouse.
Filled with great gags and touching stories, The Last Laugh is nostalgic and poignant and guaranteed to be London’s best comedy night out.
The Last Laugh is written and directed by the award-winning Paul Hendy, and stars Bob Golding as Morecambe, Simon Cartwright as Monkhouse and Damian Williams as Cooper.
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Captioned, 15 March, 2:30pm
It’s refreshing to see how well Cooper, Monkhouse and Morecambe get on, rather than the antagonism bordering on cliché that we tend to get in bio-dramas about comedians in theatre or film. Hendy has them gently ribbing each other – particularly about Monkhouse’s big book of carefully pre-prepared jokes – but affectionately, and out of love for what they do. And we get a lot about the history of British comedy through the trio’s reminiscences about who they’ve worked with and admired. It’s often pretty illuminating, even if Hendy plays it safe by steering clear of really addressing the sexism, homophobia and racism underlying the period on which he’s focused.
I enjoyed The Last Laugh a lot, while never quite buying into it as a piece of drama. For the first half of its 80-minute running time, you think this superstar joke-off might be heading somewhere — and even if it isn’t, the interplay is so good that it’s fun just being in the room with these take-offs of one-offs. Damian Williams has enormous dishevelled authority as Cooper, playing with his props, firing back at Monkhouse’s ruminative smarm with rough banter of his own.
| 2025 | West End |
West End |
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