Well, it didn’t feel like a marathon. In fact, I think the intervals were longer than the show, and just as enjoyable. But the more yesterday’s Robert Lepage’s nine-act saga Lipsynch at the Barbican sinks in, the more I’m convinced it’s a masterpiece.

Its merits are both spiritual and technical, story and staging combined in a kind of pure theatrical magic that mixes the best of Complicite with the wit and pungency of Francois Truffaut and Singin’ in the Rain. Only much darker and hipper.

As usual when a foreign maestro hits town, the British theatre community goes along to applaud and gawp in equal measure. My immediate confreres in the auditorium included actors Philip Franks, Marti Cruickshank and new star Tom Mison (Mr Bingley in Lost in Austen on television, and currently a fine George Tesman at the Gate) and director David Freeman.

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It was the centenary of Michael Redgrave’s birth last March, but I don’t recall reading much about it. Hooray for the Chichester Film Festival, then, which has been running a season of his films (and of Vanessa’s), including the film of the National Theatre Uncle Vanya which started life on the stage of the pleasant cathedral city.

Redgrave’s Vanya has never been bettered — not by Nicol Willliamson, Michael Gambon, Stephen Dillane or Simon Russell Beale, all tremendous in the role — and his sadder than sad comical performance was a jewel set in the silver sea of Olivier as Astrov, Joan Plowright as Sonya, Sybil Thorndike as the old nurse and Max Adrian as Waffles.

Chichester screened this film, alongside the glorious Hitchcock classic The Lady Vanishes, The Browning Version, The Importance of Being Earnest (Redgrave as Jack, Michael Denison as a definitive Algy, Joan Greenwood and Dorothy Tutin delightful as Gwendolen and Cecily, and Edith “a handbag?!” Evans, of course) and such wonderful rarities as Dead of Night, in which Redgrave played a ventriloquist  possessed by his own dummy and — this Saturday, introduced by his son Corin — The Stars Look Down, a politically engaged film by Carol Reed set in a Northern mining community.

It’s curious how quickly forgotten Redgrave seems to have become, save for the efforts of his own family and the recent biography, Secret Dreams, by Alan Strachan (it’s ironic, too, that neither Laurence Olivier nor John Gielgud has a book about them half as good as Strachan’s).

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The news that Rain Man starring Josh Hartnett and Adam Godley will open ten days later than scheduled means that I now have no excuse for not going to Eurobeat at the Novello, the show that was clashing on the same opening night.

The delay must mean that the producers are waiting for a change in the weather, or for Josh Hartnett to learn how to act on a stage; he hasn’t done so, apparently, since drama school.

Rain also stopped play at Lord’s on Sunday, where the resurgent England team under Kevin Pietersen’s captaincy squashed South Africa in a 50-over contest that, after delays and stoppages, was reduced to thirty-nine, then thirty-three, and finally just twenty overs. That we had any match at all was something of a miracle in the inspissated gloom. 

Mind you, the gloom was not nearly as inspissated as most of the chaps in the hospitality boxes.

This really was a day for the drowning of sorrows, and quite a few cats. And a good opportunity to wander round the ground and bump into theatre types in the bars and meeting points.

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