Davies’ big mistakes were to slow the Rattigan to a snail’s pace, to make it unnecessarily gloomy, and to deprive its central character – Hester, Lady Collyer – of the anger, intensity, classiness, intelligence, wit and talent which she has to display along with the despair which at first overwhelms her and which she eventually largely overcomes. It is unfair to pick on Rachel Weisz, who may be capable of acting, when asked to. And it certainly isn’t her fault that she was allowed to speak a mid-Atlantic, classiness demotic. Obviously, she also can’t help being too young for the part.

For some reason, Davies goes out of his way to create scenes in which Hester’s husband, the judge, becomes a mother-ridden wimp, perhaps the better to create in our minds the idea that he might be a closet homosexual, which is nowhere in the Rattigan, and weakens the play’s point. At every other moment Terence goes out of his way to create slushiness and anachronism. It is hardly likely, for instance that a judge would have a huge scene with his wife in front of the chauffeur, or that middle class people would harangue each other in the street or in an art gallery. Come to that, in the 50s, gas fires did not self-ignite, nor did penurious middle class people leave the equivalent of a quid or two lying in the street.

Davies robs several characters of their real interest. Rattigan’s landlady and the disgraced doctor are both sharply-written and crucial to Hester’s self-discovery.

And what was all that singing about?

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It is a marvelous play and it is very Rattigan-ish.

The anglo-catholic school in South Downs was presumably Lancing (DH’s alma mater) and John Blakemore, the existentially-intelligent central figure, is DH himself in 1962 (right down to their shared and odd use of the description of “sailor” for a father who is presumably an officer in the merchant navy. We are within our rights to assume that this was intended to be an accurate account of the mores of such a place and time.  I can’t help feeling David Hare is letting off ideological steam rather than giving us a strictly fair account. Time, I fear, for a personal note.

I can’t say what Lancing was like in the early 60s. Blakemore is at the school by virtue of having failed to get into a grander one. It happens that I went to a public school even more minor than Lancing, by virtue of having failed to get in there. At our pleasantly arriviste place, we didn’t  (if I recall right) use the “f” word as much as Hare has his fellows doing. We were interested in the queerness of our queerer masters, who were a notable minority amongst the staff, but we didn’t obsess on it. We did indeed take a great deal of interest in our “tools” and those of our fellows, and mutual masturbation was officially  frowned on but not considered particularly queer.

I wondered, during South Downs, whether any boy could have discussed Pope’s poetry with the sophistication offered by Blakemore, and (since I was amongst the most eager literary boys at our school) whether I could have. I doubt it. I think Blakemore’s discussion of religion might ring truer: at that time, any student of history had a glancing understanding of the doctrinal rows of the 16th Century.

Hare gets very right, I think, the irritation of a bright boy with the rules of such a school – indeed any school and most institutions. To be fair to him, and this is central to this marvellous piece, John Bakemore is no cipher. Indeed, he is a wonderfully drawn boy. His intelligence, his understanding of his own predicament, his impotence in dealing with it, his random kindness, cruelty and vulnerability are all very moving. And so too, finally, are the responses he draws from all those around him.

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You’ll have read by now that Hester Collyer has run away from her husband, a rich judge, to be with a slightly inadequate but handsome ex-RAF pilot and WW2 hero. Most reviewers seem to think that she is an upper middle class woman struggling to adapt to her new poverty and driven to her unpretty pass by lust. So far, so conventionally Rattigan.

But Rattigan is a much more subtle social operator than that. To some extent all his plays are about dissidence, and precisely not about conformity. A bit like Singer Sargent, he can deliver a swagger portrait, but the picture which emerges is of the troubled mind, not the complacent one. It is obvious that Hester is troubled by the way Freddie Page cannot return her love, and that is a big part of the play.

But what happens next is what matters. Hester is a clergyman’s daughter. She is clear that Collyer, her judge and husband, believes that he stooped when he married her, and his act of marrying beneath him ought to make her feel doubly obligated to him: as a wife, and as a wife riskily chosen.

Rejected by Page, Hester knows that she cannot go back to Collyer. With Page she has known proper sexual relations and she knows that Collyer can’t deliver. So she has to move on. The new freedom she has to risk is not particularly a matter of breaking social convention (that very slightly more troubles Freddie then her). It is about getting on with being whatever falls to her: maybe the right man, maybe loneliness.. who knows? She also has the chance of artistic and economic freedom, but neither is free. (The young couple in the piece are an example of the new equality available to young women, if they are determined enough.)

And the big point about Rattigan’s play is that all around her she has already been shown how open the world is to peculiarity. Her landlady prefers amiability to goodness; the defrocked doctor is a good man but has been a criminal (an abortionist, perhaps). It falls to him to spell it out in the denouement. What follows is a bit of a spoiler: the doctor’s last speeches are about the ordinary human courage you need to face a world in which there are no rules. And Hester decides at last to face that fact.

So where is the Rattigan of stereotype here? Where the Rolls Royces and the Saville Row suits and the impeccable social manners? To all appearances he may be Collyer, but there are obviously much bigger bits of his interiority all over the other characters.

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I wanted mostly to add that this show does not belong to Ian McKellen’s richly involving central performance. Everyone in this cast is given big moments, but it is their smaller continuing ones which make the whole enterprise so exhilerating. I chatted to Annie Hemingway’s parents after the first act and very nearly commiserated them for having to watch their daughter do a perfectly adequate but inert pregnant frump. Thank goodness, I kept quiet and was rewarded by Ms Hemingway’s runaway second act: her Rita very nearly got the mid-show-applause a non-press night audience might well have given it.

By the way: Rita is a working class Neapolitan equivalent of Hester Collyer’s middle class Londoner in Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea. Both have discovered what it is to be possessed by their love of a man. Of course, Rita has the advantage of being loved in return, which makes a difference.

The Eduardo de Filippo/Mike Poulton piece is in large measure about love (and Don Antonio is surrounded by it). But it is also about whether public and the private: the pastry shop owner has it in for Antonio for a transgression into his family life.

It is also about the age-old moral dilemma of the strong-man and society. Was Caesar worth the trouble?  Can the Prince really follow Machiavelli’s advice? And of course, was Tony Soprano capable of being thought good?

It is worth invoking Soprano. That TV show was built on a fantastical proposition: a Mafia boss might discover sensitivity. The Syndicate wonders what would happen if a Mafia boss really was a benign despot within his bit of actual and social territory.

Most critics have said of the play that the last act is a bit over the top without quite packing punch. But that response may flow from a misunderstanding of the play’s tone. It is a piece of myth or even pantomime, not realism. It is a fantasy. That accounts for the charm of the Mafia boss and for the charm of the central thesis.

So the point of the thing is that this is what high culture can do when Disney meets the Sopranos. See it like that, and one might even like the last act. To nail this (and this is a spoiler remark): can a bad man really be good and isn’t it more likely that a good man – horrified by the real awfulness of the herd – might descend to the kind of wickedness that hoi ploi understand?

I am very glad I saw this new version by Mike Poulton. I would go to some lengths to see anything he’d done.

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[After this note was written, press night came and went. The reviews started a little sour (mostly detecting a datedness in the piece), and accorded well with my impression. The Times and The Telegraph took more or less that line. The Guardian and the Independent were warmer and made me feel a little guilty. The Express was generous in a good way.]

Now go on…

Those of us who had tickets for this revival on 27 May, and for the pre-show talk by its director Trevor Nunn, had a sort of perfect evening.

Mr Nunn set us up nicely for a piece about theatrical happenstance by describing the long, rather fraught,  saga of his coming – after a false start and 40-odd years, to direct the piece. And he spoke of its early days, when coincidence accelerated its rise to fame when Ronald Bryden raved about it in the Observer almost by mistake from Edinburgh and Kenneth Tynan – then the paper’s film critic – previewed the review in the office and snapped it up for the NT, under the noses of Nunn’s RSC. (The cold light of Googling throws a little doubt on that account…)

On to the theatre and we learned that Tim Curry was unable to perform that night as The Player and so Chris Andrew Mellon had to pick up his role in a blink (and was brilliant): all his in-character lines about the need to improvise were doubly (or is it trebly?) poignant. And then – this was a kind of bliss – I sat across the aisle from Nunn as his pen-light flashed across his notepad (in some otherwise preternaturally darkened moments), which was shades of The Real Inspector Hound.  The fourth wall was torn down and pulverised into stardust.

Here’s a reviewish thing which I’m sure it is OK to say: this show looks surprisingly glamorous, at least when it needs to.

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For a while I thought we were in New York (the accents) and then some odd version of England (this perfume shop states its prices in old English money). But it was Budapest all right, and more generally Middle Europe. But much more important, we were in a special, magic place of the kind that hit me hard when I read the marvellous I Served the King of England.

The production was just what one hopes for in the Minerva: it packs in a huge amount without showing off.

The performances were all very strong. The essential, supporting figure of the very Jewish boss of the shop (warm-hearted, jealous) was beautifully done by Jack Chissick.

But I think the broadsheet reviews I’ve seen don’t quite capture how wonderful the central lovers are. Joe McFadden and Dianne Pilkington don’t have much obvious glamour going for them, which is ideal for this piece which uses all their intelligence and stylishness instead.

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Ibsen’s Master Builder is a neurotic and so is everyone in his world. I take it that this is how the world of Darwin and psycholgy and socialism took any advanced dramatist and especially a Swedish one. Halvard Solness (Michael Pennington) is a country boy who made good (took “the main chance”, says his bitter older partner). He’s a bereaved dreamer; a thwarted romantic. He sees himself as a transformative romantic hero who can bend reality by his desires. He’s fond of women, and a decade before we meet him, couldn’t keep his hands off a thirteen yeard old girl in virginal white. When we meet him, he’s used his sex appeal and his cunning to fend off some of his insecurities, but he’s still in hock to them.

The thirteen yeard old, now a feisty 23, bowls in and confronts him. Hilda (Naomi Frederick) doesn’t much mind having been abused (as we put it), but she does want her payback. She has become ardent and ruthless and believes that the Master Builder and she are cut from similar cloth. She wants him to have remained as magnificent as she remembers him and is angered by his timidity. She re-energises him. He overdoes it and plunges to his death from one of his own signature spires, the very item which had first inspired her.

The difficulty with the production lies in its modernity. David Edgar, in his programme notes, says he has been careful not to overdo the anachronisms in his translations, and it’s true, but he has left us with a play in which quite modern people are dressed up in old-fashioned clothes and speak a good neutral modern English. We are left with a play which we are invited to look at in 21st century terms and which left me thinking that the central couple are tiresomely crackers. (Naomi Frederick is startling sharp, but perhaps just a tad too shrill.) One might argue that this play was young once, and as fresh as a daisy: didn’t the characters seem overwrought back then? I think the answer lies in its earlier, and now removed, capacity to shock. To expose the real workings of repression and weakness was, at the beginning of the last century, a novelty. To take a work devised back then and to deprive it of its quaintness – of clues as to its age and ethos - invites us to view at as a modern piece rather than as a period one. A bit of power falls through the crack between the two.

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The Real Inspector Hound and The Criticwere marvellously-matched (plays-within-plays mocking critics, who blundered into the action). They are very lovable pieces: affectionate toward all parties, even the critics, but especially the showfolk. They were also wonderfully done. You expect Nicholas Le Provost to have got his chops round high-speed language, but plenty of the others had too. Joe Dixon and Sean Foley might have been in a contest for the country’s best physical comic, each as spectacular in both plays as you could possibly hope for.

It is late in the run, and we saw the pieces on the evening of a matinee day. Perhaps that excuses the way some of the actors had slightly lost their grip on the awesome feats of memory required. Richard McCabe never lost his words, and was powerful and compelling as the neglected critic Moon in the Stoppard, but in the Sheridan, his Puff sometimes slightly ran out of it.

The oddity, though, is that the very perfectionism – the extraordinary levels of skill of every sort now required of actors and productions – left these shows, and perhaps especially the Sheridan, a little cold. Because they were so canny and deft, they were also a little shy of the imperfections which make theatre human, and which were the subject of the plays. Una Stubbs was a comfort, and so was Derek Griffiths, perhaps precisely because they were more obviously troupers.

A curious sign of this problem might be the last scene of the Sheridan. It became a tour de force of circus instead of a fond reflection on over-ambitious finales. I picked up a copy yesterday in the Petersfield Bookshop after an excellent affordable lunch at La Piazetta. The business required by Sheridan could have been purveyed better by an am-dram group.

I hope you won’t take me wrong. I’d go back and see these shows anytime and know that this was breath-taking stuff.

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I go to Shaw knowing that I’ll enjoy it. I’m his target demographic. That’s: intelligent, middle class, mildly well-read, quite snobbish. To be a bit more precise, that’s not so much socially snobbish, as generally superior. Shaw was, of course, stratospheric in that way. He is also a feminist and a socialist, but only of a sort, and not in a way to worry a Tory.

I have seen very few things which went really well in the big theatre at CFT. Musicals can work there, and I wonder if it’s because the performers can be miked. Certainly, Oklahoma was a recent joy, though older members of the audience didn’t respond to its artful minimalism and thought instead that it was a bit dowdy. At first I was inclined to think the theatre in the round needs big productions but that can’t be the whole point since I quite liked the account of Rattigan’s more intimate Separate Tables.  Mind you, by then I’d cottoned onto wearing amplifying headsets, inspite of having perfectly good  hearing. I don’t think it was auditory troubles which stopped me really liking an earlier Arcadia(the Stoppard) which can certainly fill a big space and is by a master of middle class theatrical mores (elsewhere, it has been amongst my favourite pieces). I think the essence of the thing may be that it takes a lot of vim to enliven both that particular theatre and the perma-matinee audience it attracts. 

Anyway, to Pygmalion. I am much more of a fan of Honeysuckle Weeks (Eliza) than most cognoscenti. She has a weird and frightening delivery, like she’s forgotten her lines. But her urgency seems really tough, fresh and compelling and her cool was properly alabaster. She was a bit gabbly and shrieky, and that was perhaps because she wanted to address audibility issues. Phil Davis is a natural Doolittle and we were safe whenever he was on (though he could afford to take the foot off the throttle occasionally). Peter Eyre as Pickering was a proper British theatre actor, with a voice like a Fisherman’s Friend lobbed down a trawler’s hatch. Stephanie Cole as Higgins’s mother was completely reliable, as was Susie Blake’s housekeeper.

I am a huge fan of Rupert Everett, but he is often insufferable. Red Carpet is an exceptional memoir.  In his documentaries he is gripping for about two-thirds of the time and the most frightful baby and bimbo for the rest. His films are a shocking mixed bag, almost all made interesting mostly by his appearance. His Higgins was sort of OK, but it was full of mannerisms which were scattered almost nervously in front of us on the off-chance we’d take to one or other of them. One couldn’t help feeling that he couldn’t take the job seriously: I wondered if we were getting Everett’s own arrogance rather than Higgins’s. However, in the last act, when Liza and Higgins have their showdown, we seemed to hit the real McCoy. It even made sense that we’d had a second chance to have an ice-cream and a stiffener in preparation.

I can easily imagine Everett making a marvellous film Higgins for Emma Thompson’s version. And Carey Mulligan might well bring more edge to its Eliza than Honeysuckle Weeks. I am not looking forward to Thompson turning the story into a silly feminist tract just because it would at a certain level – not Shaw’s – make more sense. (And of course it’s silly of Thompson to diss Audrey Hepburn, but that’s another story about all sorts of things.)

Back at the CFT, the last scene’s row felt like the core of the piece. Higgins can teach Eliza to perform, but her character was waiting for a deeper transformation. I think Shaw is saying that Higgins knows that her transformation has happened and that she, Freddie and Pickering have wrought it. Higgins wasn’t needed for it. He hadn’t noticed that quite a tough bird had been lurking there all along. He thought Eliza had always been and remained deeply common. Actually, she had never really been commonplace and was even less so now.  She had always had problems, and now faced an enlarged ambition. But she would wobble and handle things. For his part, Higgins has, sadly, to admit that there are plenty of transformations he himself needs, but can’t quite be bothered with. Or maybe he’s got even greater weaknesses.

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