Hot stuff from Antony Sher as Edmund Kean at the Apollo, telling no less than the truth with his line, “There’s no one here I don’t really know.” The first night crowd includes many of Tony and partner Greg Doran’s nearest and dearest, marshalled to their seats by press agent Peter Thompson sucking white wine through a straw and producer Thelma Holt, resplendent as ever in black Issie Miyaki.

Cameron Mackintosh’s right hand man Nick Allott is cheerfully drawing attention to himself on crutches having recently fallen down a ski slope and buggered his shoulder, his leg and most of his ribs. In the interval, Peter Hall reminds me of how Alan Badel,who played Kean thirty-five years ago, would imperiously regard anyone else on the stage with him as if to say, “How dare you stand up here next to me, what makes you think you are good enough?”

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“Masturbation can be fun” sang the hippies in Hair, and to prove the point, the sensational new Broadway musical of Spring Awakening contains what is surely the White Way’s first self-abuse hand-job solo number. Myself, I could have lived without it. One sees quite enough of that sort of thing at home.

Also, the show, which is both a beautifully accurate and highly imaginative account of Frank Wedekind’s 1891 shocker about adolescent sexuality and suicide, is unnecessarily over-explicit in the central copulation scene (”all titties and butts” cracked a customer on the phone home in the intermission). I’m not being puritanical; too much tenderness is thus trampled.

Otherwise, the book and lyrics by Steven Sater (who happens to be Michael Rudman’s cousin) and music by Duncan Sheik truly are in the class and spirit of Hair and indeed of Rent, with a strong resemblance to both shows. How refreshing to see a new American musical without a shadow of Sondheim! I hope it wins a few of the eleven Tony awards it’s nominated for on 10 June.

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So far in New York, I’ve only seen “real people” on stage: Frankie Valli, Lotte Lenya, Kurt Weill, Joan Didion and Angela Lansbury. Of course the last one’s a cheat: Angela Lansbury is not appearing as herself, but as
an old tennis champion in Terrence McNally’s Deuce, alongside the sainted Marian Seldes. But to most people in the audience she is really Jessica Fletcher, star of Murder She Wrote.

It is over thirty years since she appeared on the New York stage as Mrs Lovett in Sweeney Todd and Mama Rose in Gypsy. The latter performance came to London and was an unforgettable triumph. Now 81 years old, she still displays the elegance of thought and gesture she did back then, but McNally’s play is thin stuff. She and Seldes were once doubles champions, and they chew the fat on changes in the game – sponsorship, prize money, open sexuality – while watching a match in the Open Championship at Flushing Meadow. The stadium is miraculously evoked in Michael Blakemore’s production (design by Peter J Davison, lighting by Mark Henderson) with a filmed crowd following every ball.

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There’s an article in today’s New York Times about Manhattan as a movie lot. It doesn’t mention On the Town because it doesn’t have to: Times Square is teeming with sailors in pristine white uniforms on shore leave. I think they’re part of a mass audition for the next revival of the Bernstein, Comden and Green musical; it will have to be good to rival George C Wolfe’s here ten years ago (forget Jude Kelly’s at the ENO).

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Yesterday afternoon, on the exact centenary of Laurence Olivier’s birth (22 May 1907) I dreamt I went to Mandelay. In reality, I went to Dorking. Olivier was born there, at 26 Wathen Road, just off the High Street, in the shadow of Box Hill and the glorious north Downs of Surrey, and two hundred yards from St Martin’s Church of England where his father was a curate. It was a glorious day, but there was no outward sign of festivity. Low key would be an exaggerated way of describing the town’s celebration of its most famous son, the greatest actor of the twentieth century, and the founding director of our National Theatre. In Wathen Road, a street of handsome red brick Edwardian villas, a group of disinterested punk teenagers ambled up the slope from the nearby Meadowbank park. As they disappeared into the High Street, a great silence fell. You could hear a pin drop. The houses all appeared to be unoccupied. Then a faint playing on the flute in a nearby upper storey. Number 26 showed no signs of life. A single red rose had been pinned to the wall next to the blue plaque proclaiming the actor’s birth on this site.

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Summer is officially here not only when the Open Air Theatre and the Globe open their doors, but when the First test Match is underway at Lord’s Cricket Ground in St John’s Wood. Within a day of spending an interval at the Barbican with artistic director Graham Sheffield, I was chatting again to him by the main gates of Lord’s at tea-time yesterday. Resplendent in his MCC member’s yellow and red striped tie, complete with brown leisure wear and picnic hamper, Graham, a lifelong cricket nut, was explainig to me how he’d ruined his own lunch by breaking his wine glass before consuming his bottle of claret. At that very moment, a silver Jaguar purred past us onto the street: it was Mick Jagger, also leaving for the day as bad light had interrupted play.

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Everyone has rightly said how superb is Declan Donnellan’s production of Three Sisters in Russian at the Barbican (mind you, when did you last see a bad production of Three Sisters? They just don’t happen). What nobody seems to have commented on is the barmy reconfiguration of the the theatre so that only about a third of the potential Barbican audience can see the show. Artistic director Graham Sheffield ruefully admits that in losing two thirds of his capacity he had no choice because Donnellan and designer Nick Ormerod insisted on building the “environmental” temporary auditorium over the existing one.

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The theatre nearest to my own front door in north London is the Roundhouse (or the Round House, as it used to be known) and I relish the fact that it is now open again. Until recently the nearest would have been the Etcetera, upstairs in the Oxford Arms in Camden Town, a venue I visit far too infrequently. It is a comfortable small theatre — well it was last night when just fifteen of us were watching Hanna Berrigan’s smart, funny revival of Ionesco’s The Bald Prima Donna. The pub is one of the liveliest in the Camden Lock area, a location I think of as the stews of the Middle Ages, Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair or Dante’s seventh circle of hell, depending on my mood and its own level of nastiness.

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It’s most uncharacteristic of Nicholas Hytner to have lost his cool over drama critics who have been around since he was a student (and he’s turned fifty; not too old for the job yet, Nick?). He must be referring to Billington, Nightingale, de Jongh and John Peter. At least in the past I’ve had the good grace to keep moving, if only downmarket, from the Financial Times to the Observer to the Daily Mail. And I rather pride myself on being marginally instrumental in the fledgling drama reviewing careers of at least three notable female arts commentators: Annalena McAfee, Claire Armitstead and Susannah Clapp. I think Nick’s problem with the reviews over A Matter of Life and Death lie simply with the fact that the reviewers have all rather flamboyantly displayed an intimate knowledge of the great original movie at the expense of assessing the stage version. But that is always going to happen when you take a ride on the back of another cultural — in this case, iconic — phenomenon and are found not to measure up.

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