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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Rueful is perhaps the best way to describe the British writer Simon Gray's rankling wit, which he has purveyed, over the decades, first from the West End stage and, most recently, from a series of hilarious, superbly written diaries. Gray is a sort of dandy of disappointments; for him, the light at the end of the tunnel is always an oncoming train. Listen to him meditate on the accusation that he brownnosed his way to the top, in his 2004 volume "The Smoking Diaries": "If only . . . I hadn't drunk so very much through my late forties, throughout my fifties, I might have--well, what? At least have got my plays returned more speedily by Trevor Nunn, for instance, possibly bits of them actually read by his predecessor at the National, Richard Eyre, to whom I never actually sent them, on the grounds that every time I met him he seemed to wince."
Gray's first West End hit, "Butley" (written in 1971 and now in revival at the Booth, under the direction of Nicholas Martin), draws on his early experiences as a lecturer in English literature at the University of London and proves him to have been an early connoisseur of his own collapse. Even before Ben Butley (Nathan Lane), a put-upon literature...
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