The Whastonstage nominations party certainly lived up to its reputation as the best gig in town on Friday lunchtime. One or two people have even rung me up to ask did I know how they got home, and with whom. 
 
I retired to Chinatown at a reasonable hour with a couple of good new friends and was amazed at how much everyone seemed to have enjoyed themselves. Our guest presenters Graham Norton, Mel Giedroyc and Michael Ball were all superb, and Leslie Garrett sang her socks off with “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”

What I love are the unexpecetd conjunctions of people, such as the opportunity I suddenly had to introduce Des Barrit to Steven Berkoff, or the chance to make sure that the delightful Niki Evans, formerly an X Factor finalist on television, and currently singing Mrs Johnson in Blood Brothers, met her hero, Mr Ball.

Tracie Bennett of La Cage aux Folles told me she read this blog “to find out what I’m up to,” (so do I, actually) while Hannah Waddingham of A Little Night Music rhapsodised over working with Trevor Nunn and the pleasure she took in being photographed with her parents on opening night at the Menier Chocolate Factory.

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It was both bracing and salutary to read David Hare’s review of Peter Gill’s book Apprenticeship in the Guardian because it so clearly restated ancient antipathies in our subsidised theatre that are perhaps outmoded but nonetheless fundamental.

Basically, the Royal Court (the spiritual home of both Gill and Hare) was always opposed to the RSC, suspect of its proprietorial approach to verse-speaking, resistant to its empire building, scornful of Les Miserables.

As Hare puts it, Gill regards that globally cloned musical as disastrously influential — as influential, in its way, as Look Back in Anger — and leading to a “cash-based populism” that threatens the glories of the subsidised theatre.

As Les Miserables is itself a product of the subisidised theatre, not a symptom, you can see where the fault lines in this argument are developing. Ironically, the Royal Court has undoubtedly prospered because of Peter Hall’s initiative in founding the RSC, even though its vintage era personnel — directors William Gaskill and John Dexter, playwrights John Osborne and Peter Shaffer  — were in the Olivier camp of the new National Theatre rather than the Hall-driven RSC.

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I never thought I’d go dancing in the hall where Twelfth Night was supposedly first performed in 1601, but so it turned out at a wedding party over the weekend. Like Sir Andrew Aguecheek, I can cut a caper when required, though I don’t pretend to have the back trick as strong as any man in Illyria…

Middle Temple has many more theatrical associations besides that play: members have included Thomas Shadwell and both the great Restoration Williams, Wycherley and Congreve.

Recent treasurers include the late Lord Weedon, chairman of the RSC, and counted among the current members is my friend Roger Wyand QC, whose niece Letty was married with all due pomp and ceremony in St Clement Danes before we removed for dinner and dancing in the hallowed hall.

Our theatrical provenance was boosted by the presence of Letty’s sister, Diana, who was a wardrobe assistant on the new James Bond movie, and the upcoming Miss Marple televison series starring Julia McKenzie, and Letty’s best friend Pascal, who works as Jamie Oliver’s on-line manager (and, coincidentally, with my son who is producing some television programmes right now with Jamie in Louisiana). 

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