Ok, so a man walks into an office carrying a box of chocolates...
    The office belongs to a theatre censor. We're in a totalitarian-state-not-specified. The man with the chocolates writes plays. Comic plays. His current one is called 'Romeo and Juliet: a comedy'. And the censor wants to censor it. The thing about the censor is he has no sense of humour and knows nothing about plays. Hilarity ensues? Well, no. The tricky thing about The Last Laugh is, there's no plot and no punch line. 
      Martin Freeman (the Writer) and Roger Lloyd Pack (the Censor) are a class act. They know how to do funny. The difficulty lies almost exclusively with the material they've been given. They're walking through glue and the production doesn't give them much of a helping hand.
       Knock knock. Who's there? A sound designer. Um no, actually there isn't one. In consequence, the muffled rumbles and bangs of bombs that intermittently emanate from the stage have all the finesse of a secondary school production. The blocking alternates between being repetitive and static. The set and lighting are bleak and depressing. Mock daylight and lamplight spread flatly across a vast office that reeks of decrepit bureaucracy - a dial phone, scratched filing cabinets and no computer. A similar setting could be the cradle for a gloriously black, Orwellian satire. But bizarrely what we get is a didactic exposition on the mechanics of comedy.
      For the longer part of two hours Martin Freeman stands on stage and explains to the censor how jokes work and how laughter can liberate. Nothing incisive is said on the nature of comedy and both Martin Freeman and Roger Lloyd Pack are left floundering in a one-dimensional wilderness, their characters free from any convincing motivations or cultural anchors. Originally written in Japanese, The Last Laugh appears in Richmond to be lost in translation. Its only achievement is to reduce comedy to a sequence of old-fashioned formulae - thereby missing the point entirely. You can't help feeling more thought should have been put into the whole affair (as the actress said to the bishop).
Iona Firouzabadi