What is the point of a review?

And do some reviews miss the point?

I went to the Noel Coward Theatre the other night to see The Last Laugh. It’s a play written and directed by Paul Hendy very loosely about the nature of comedy with three very good actors playing Eric Morecambe, Tommy Cooper and Bob Monkhouse. Squint a little bit and it really feels as if they have come back from the dead in all their wisecracking glory.

My partner and I laughed throughout. As did the rest of the audience on the star-studded opening night. Even, I expect, the likes of Bobby Davro, Su Pollard and Frank Skinner, who must have seen the creaky punchlines coming a mile off.

It wasn’t the most original of works, but having laughed almost constantly for 80 minutes, while I had a few minor misgivings, I thought it deserved four stars. You can read my full review here. So I was surprised when I read some other reviews and found that they hadn’t been quite as forgiving.

Brian Logan in The Guardian was one of the more generous reviewers. He said in his three star write-up that it felt more like a tribute act than a play before accepting that the gags and routines are “recreated with an affection that’s easy to submit to.”

Nick Curtis in the Standard plunged the dagger in with two stars. He praised the impressions and accepted that there were easy chuckles but added that “the script is one of the laziest I’ve come across in a long time.”

When I was a rock critic there were always disgruntled fans who would write into the NME letters page saying “Was XXX at the same gig as me? Did he write the review from the bar?”. That’s not the case with the Guardian and Standard. In fact while they might actually have been at different performances I do recognise what they wrote. They did see the same show as me.

And, of course, they are entitled to say it if that’s what they believe. I just wonder what purpose it serves. If a review is guide for the consumer, a kind of moneysavingexpert.co.uk for the arts, surely it essentially needs to say whether the play is worth seeing. To put it even more bluntly than I did in my review, if you want a fun night out with guaranteed gags to make you giggle The Last Laugh does what it says on the tin.

Maybe it’s just a crowdpleaser rather than a criticpleaser. If Nick Curtis believes the script is that lazy he is absolutely entitled to write that. Maybe it is a matter of emphasis. It’s a bit of a stretch, but I can even see Nick’s point. I may have even made it myself in a kinder way, saying that the play circles around familiar themes and doesn’t go very deep.

But I think it is intended primarily as a comedy . There are lots of laughs. At old jokes, certainly, but the performances helped. If it had been me, Brian Logan and Nick Curtis onstage I doubt if there would have been anywhere near as many laughs. Certainly not where they were intended anyway.

This is definitely not a piece attacking critics. We are an endangered species already and I’m one myself. If anything I guess it’s a piece attacking the reductive nature of star ratings. Nick Curtis could see plenty of faults in the production, which outweighed the positives and knocked the rating down. I could see similar faults but chose to look at the positives.

I’m happy to stand by my four star review. I feel this would fairly reflect the responses of audience members who buy a ticket. Yes, they might come out saying that they’d heard all the jokes before, but that doesn’t mean they would claim to be shortchanged. You don’t go to a show featuring Cooper, Morecambe and Monkhouse expecting new gags.

And yes, at times The Last Laugh does seem like a tribute, but I think theatre goers won’t have a problem with buying tickets to see Cooper’s fez, Morecambe’s glasses and Monkhouse’s suave stand-up. And at least they weren’t holograms.

Pictures by Pamela Raith