The electrifying revival of A Prayer For My Daughter at the Young Vic is yet another testament to the durability of the best new plays from another era. The same fate seems not to have befallen Howard Brenton’s Weapons of Happiness at the Finborough.

Brenton’s play was the first new piece on the Lyttelton stage, not its inaugural production (as The Times stated) — that was Peggy Ashcroft in Beckett’s Happy Days — and it got critical short shrift then as it did the other day.

Mainly this is because critics think that equating a strike in a British potato crisp factory with the old upheavals in Eastern Europe is an essentially fatuous dramatic tactic. I don’t know why critics think that, but they do, as if Brenton hadn’t seen the irony of this parallelism himself; indeed, it’s part of the dramatic spring of the play.

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On Tuesday 5 February, Whatsonstage.com took 175 theatregoers to see Samuel West’s critically acclaimed revival of Patrick Marber’s poker based play, Dealer’s Choice at the Trafalgar Studios. As our theatregoers settled into their top price seats they were treated to a funny, poignant and challenging production which follows the staff of a small Italian restaurant as they prepare for a night of poker. As a special treat the first twenty people to book for the Outing were given a free programme signed by all the cast and the understudies.

After the show all our theatregoers were invited to attend a Q&A with cast members and director Samuel West. We had a fantastic turn out from the cast with Stephen Wight, Ross Boatman, Malcolm Sinclair, Samuel Barnett and Roger Lloyd Pack all answering questions and talking happily about their roles in the production. Samuel West discussed his thoughts on the plays significance, while Roger Lloyd Pack confessed to having to share less than glamorous dressing room accommodation with other members of the cast. All our theatregoers were amazed to find out that the cards the players used were carefully sorted and ordered every night to make sure that the cards they were holding and playing matched the cards they were discussing in the dialogue.

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Chance encounters of the preferred kind: the last theatrical I bumped into before going to Madrid for a few days was Julian Clary on the 24 bus to Camden from the West End; he’d just come off stage in Cabaret and was sitting quietly on the top deck.

I expressed surprise that he was not ferried northwards from Shaftesbury Avenue in a luxury limo, but he muttered something about the pleasures of working for Bill Kenwright and changed the subject.

Leaving theatre behind for a few days I set off for Madrid and a tour of the museums — where I promptly ran into Nicolas Kent, artistic director of the Tricycle, in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection. He urged me not to miss the Leon Kossoff painting of Kilburn Underground ticket office, nor did I, in a nice little English room of Hockney, Michael Andrews and Lucien Freud.

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We need to overturn the cliché thinking that consigns musicals to big theatres and plays to small ones.

Musicals are for big stages. Plays work best in small spaces. Right? Actually, no. On recent evidence, I’d say that the familiar rules have been reversed. In short, I’ve had some outstanding musical experiences in intimate theatres while I’ve seen a number of straight plays expand to fill larger houses.

Confirmation of the way musicals are often best in small spaces came with the Menier Chocolate Factory’s La Cage aux Folles. Back in 1986, when I saw it at the London Palladium, Arthur Laurents’ Broadway production struck me as a bland, feathers-and-frills spectacle. But what happens at the Menier? We become part of a raffish St Tropez nightclub. Philip Quast’s under-praised Georges comes before the pink, ruched curtains to woo our applause. Douglas Hodge’s Albin saucily ogles the guys at the front-row, café tables. We even get to peer into the cramped dressing room where the campy Cagelles are wriggling in and out of their basques. In short, we are complicit in the world the musical seeks to create: that of a louche Riviera niterie.

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