Posthumous Tributes and Related Developments
Gray's final volume of diaries, Coda, "so named because it rounds off the trilogy of 'Smoking Diaries' (The Smoking Diaries, The Year of the Jouncer and The Last Cigarette) … a meditation on death, or rather dying, an account of living on borrowed time," was published posthumously by Faber and Faber and Granta in November 2008. From 8 to 12 December 2008, in five 15-minute episodes, actor Toby Stephens read from this "candid and darkly comic account of coming to terms with terminal cancer" for BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week.
Simon Gray: A Celebration, directed by Harry Burton, who directed Gray's last stage production in Spring 2008 (Quartermaine's Terms at Theatre Royal, Windsor), was held at the Comedy Theatre, in London, on 15 March 2009.
A production entitled The Last Cigarette, based on Gray's and Hugh Whitemore's adaptation of the three volumes of his memoirs called The Smoking Diaries and directed by Richard Eyre, is being staged at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester, England, through 11 April 2009. On 28 April 2009, after previewing from 21 April, the production, in which Felicity Kendal, Nicholas Le Prevost, and Jasper Britton all continue to "portray the playwright through the course of the play," transfers to the Trafalgar Studios, in London's West End, where it runs through 1 August 2009.
An official web site was launched in October 2009.
The Late Middle Classes finally received its London premiere on 27 May 2010 at the Donmar Warehouse in London, directed by David Leveaux and starring Helen McCrory, Eleanor Bron, Peter Sullivan and Robert Glenister. The original production of the play, directed by Harold Pinter, was prevented from reaching its intended West End theatre by a musical about a boy band. Gray's experience of this production is the subject of his diary "Enter a Fox".
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