Gielgud's final West End play was Hugh Whitemore's "The Best of Friends" (1988). He played Sir Sydney Cockerell, director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, in a representation of a friendship between Cockerell, Bernard Shaw and Laurentia McLachlan, a Benedictine nun. Gielgud had some trouble learning his lines; at one performance he almost forgot them, momentarily distracted by seeing in a 1938 copy of "The Times", read by his character, a review of his own portrayal of Vershinin in "Three Sisters" fifty years earlier.