The Abbey in Dublin has been quietly developing a relationship with Sam Shepard, thanks to the midwifery of actor Stephen Rea, who became a close friend of the playwright when he spent a few years in London in the early 1970s.

The Abbey has just announced that Shepard has written a new play, Ages of the Moon, specifically for Rea and his brilliant fellow Celtic thesp Sean McGinley for a world premiere by the Liffey next March. Meanwhile, Shepard’s Kicking A Dead Horse starring Rea heads for New York next month before fetching up at the Almeida in September. 

I was pondering the valour and intelligence of most actors I know after spotting a particularly crass remark by Andrew Gilligan in the Evening Standard the other day: something about what pleasure it always gave him to see an actor receive his or her come-uppance in the public arena.

It’s a very British media thing this, the resentment towards the despised “luvvies” whose preeminence in their field makes people like Gilligan seethe with envy and self-important superiority.

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Congratulations to Mark Rylance for his richly deserved Tony Award in Boeing Boeing on Broadway. And congrats, too, to Chiewetel Ejiofor and Don Warrington for their slightly less deserved gongs in the Queen’s birthday honours at the weekend — “for services to drama.”

Chewy and Don are fine blokes and excellent actors. They also happen to be black, which is neither here nor there, I suppose. But they surely receive all the public recognition they need from the audiences who pay good money or their license fees to watch them on stage or television. And you could hardly describe either actor’s career as dedicated to public service in either the subsidised sector or charitable good works.

The recognition factor is not high in each actor’s case, either. Jude Law, on the other hand, has a fine public profile, is a good actor and does a lot of unheralded work behind the scenes for organisations like the Young Vic and the National Youth Music Theatre. Yet he’s still plain Mr Jude Law, probably because his private life is a bit naughty. Will he get the nod after Hamlet, perhaps?

I see that Tim Walker on the Sunday Telegraph fell into the Jonathan Miller trap of denouncing the casting of “Dr Who” as Hamlet at the RSC in his column yesterday. I don’t know where Tim has done his theatre-going, but you’d expect a professional critic to know about David Tennant’s brilliant stage career before he was Dr Who, surely. 

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There was a great conference at the Soho Theatre on Friday, about theatre in primary schools, and primary schoolchildren in theatres. The conference was sponsored by John Lyon’s Charity, for whom I do a little light consulting, which dispenses money throughout nine London boroughs on a wide range of projects, and not just theatre.

Lyn Gardner of the Guardian and Tony Graham of the Unicorn both suggested that the cutting edge of British theatre was in work for the under-fives. Playwright David Wood reported a teacher saying to him that they had no more time for fun any more in schools — so where does that leave the government’s five hours of culture a week policy? 

And the teachers themselves said the key to it all was laying siege to the head teachers. Jacqui O’Hanlon of the RSC said that the primary schoolchildren who did a project on the Henry IV plays really flew when they realised Hal could say goodbye to Falstaff by saying he was going on to secondary school and had to get serious.

Flight was a theme sensationally taken up in a reading of a play from the Soho Theatre’s own under-elevens playwrighting scheme: in Imma Begum’s Teenage Troubles, a bird-obsessed school girl was bullied by her peers, then inveigled to the top of a church tower and pushed off. She flapped her arms and flew, and was free!

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It was fairly murky at the annual awards dinner of the Association of British Theatre Technicians. I asked lighting wizard Paule Constable if she could do anything about this and she suggested a flood of white light and candles on the tables.

But nothing happened. Just as well, perhaps, as comedian Arthur Smith, trotting out some comfortingly familiar jokes in his guest spot (actually, there was no spot, just a little light spill and lots of shadow), observed that this was one of the worst-dressed awards ceremonies he had ever been to.

What was the worst possible news for any technical worker in the theatre, wondered Arthur? “Ken Dodd’s here next week. He’s doing a three week season but it’s all in the one show.”

He also had a gag he should pass on to Neil LaBute, author of Fat Pig: “One out of three Americans weighs as much as the other two.” And then he went too far. He said that he personally kept fit by entering the Marathon; but he got chocolate peanuts all over his willy.

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Jonathan Miller is a genius and one of the most interesting stage directors of our day. But he’s completely off beam in his latest outburst, born of a fit of pique over star names in Hamlet at the RSC and the Donmar while his own modestly cast Hamlet for the Tobacco Factory in Bristol can’t find a West End home.

Like everyone else who missed it, I regret not seeing Jamie Ballard as the melancholy Dane in Bristol. But I’m certainly looking forward to seeing both David Tennant and Jude Law in the role in the West End, even though both are far too old for it (that might have been a more rewarding line of attack for Miller).

Sure, the West End is “obsessed with celebrity” in Miller’s phrase; the West End always has been, and producers need to make money, and actually Miller is the first to complain about the type of audiences the West End attracts anyway.

Does he have no residual pride in what he has achieved for the Tobacco Factory? Isn’t that good enough for him? The respect of his peers and the appreciation of an engaged local audience. Or is he, too, in it just for the money?

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The producer Paul Elliott celebrated fifty years in showbusiness — to the very day — by throwing a great party in the Prince of Wales Theatre last night. And, as he was paying, he was fully entitled to regale us with memories for nigh on fifty minutes.

I thought he only spoke for thirty minutes. But his long standing producing partner, Duncan Weldon, was timing him. “It was fifty,” he said grimly, stroking his beard. Paul had described Duncan as the only man he knew who could make good news sound like bad news.

And what a cast turned up. One table alone was host to Eric Sykes, Russ Abbot, Leslie Phillips, Michael Barrymore, Donald Sinden and producers Bill Kenwright and Nica Burns. 

Danny La Rue, very frail now, sat opposite the lustrous Rula Lenska, Lionel Blair sat nearest the stage (surprise, surprise), Barbara Windsor chirruped away at the back, John Barrowman cheered from the sidelines, and the room glittered with the light entertainment aristocracy ousted from national television by the talent and reality shows: Brian Conley, Lesley Joseph, Rolf Harris, Jeffrey Holland, Matthew Kelly. 

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Tonight’s opening of The Revenger’s Tragedy at the National is a reminder of the spontaneous combustion that often leads to the the most exciting theatre.

This is the play that in 1966 made Trevor Nunn’s reputation overnight and convinced Peter Hall that the young Turk should succeed him as head of the RSC.

In fact, Peter Hall is alleged to have said at the Stratford dress rehearsal that Nunn’s production marked the most exciting directorial debut in the town since his own.

And it was virtually a stop gap at the end of depressing season. It was Nunn’s first solo RSC production, mounted on a minimal budget on the set being used for David Warner’s Hamlet with only one well known actor in the leading roles, Ian Richardson.

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It was the week of the big blow-out: Neil LaBute’s Fat Pig proved size was a big tissue, the television series Super-sizers revealed two presenters, Giles Coren and Sue Perkins, eating for England down the ages until they were sick, and big Jodie from Blackpool (says she’s size 14; make that an 18) won the role of Nancy in Oliver! despite the fact that neither Cameron Mackintosh the producer, nor Andrew Lloyd Webber, the theatre owner, wanted her to.

Will Jodie manage eight shows a week? Will she do anything at all surprising as Nancy? Will director Rupert Goold be thrilled that she’s won the role ahead of my favourites, Rachel and Niamh, not to mention Jessie who came on strong towards the end?

I guess the answer is no to all three questions. One thing’s for certain: it’s the time of the big girl in the West End at the moment, what with Leanne Jones in Hairspray, the wonderful Ella Smith in Fat Pig and next up Jodie in Oliver!

On top of which fatty food for thought I had lunch in Joe Allen with an old friend and scoffed Eggs Benedict and hash browns just to keep Sir Derek Jacobi company; he was doing exactly the same at the next table but arose and made his exit with his customary grace and agility. Mind you, he did have broccoli on the side. I had extra fries and chocolate dessert.

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Alan Brien died last Friday. He was the first, and best ever, theatre critic on the Sunday Telegraph; indeed he was the first appointment to that newspaper when it was launched in the early 1960s.

That was the measure of Alan’s distinction. The Sunderland son of an electrical engineer on the town’s trams, he went to Bede Grammar School and Oxford via a stretch in the RAF at the end of the war including a raid on Hitler’s mountain retreat of Berchtesgarden.

He was both earthy and urbane, worldly and thoroughly radical, a brilliant talker and writer on many subjects and a great rival, as well as friend, of Kenneth Tynan. They don’t make critics like him any more, certainly not on the Sunday Telegraph, anyway.

He was a regular star contributor to Plays and Players when I edited the magazine in the mid 1970s. He was always late with his copy, to the extent that I used to have to go round to his Paddington apartment and wrench it physically from his own hands.

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There have been two theatre non-stories given a lot of prominence in the media over the past few days.

The first is that Bill Kenwright is a cheapskate producer, blocking negotiations with Equity to increase the West End minimum wage from £500 to £550 a week. The second is that producers — Kenwright among them — might end up in prison if they distort critics’ reviews in their advertising.

I don’t see why actors should be paid above the minimum rate if their show isn’t heading for a profit. And none of them has to work for Kenwright if they don’t want to. And as for protecting the subtle meanings and jewelled prose of the theatre critics — do me a favour! We’re not talking, these days, of Bernard Shaw or Dorothy Parker, let alone Philip Hope-Wallace or Kenneth Tynan.

Producers only care about critics insofar as they provide advertising copy. So it’s up to the critics not to give them any. To start moaning that producers sometimes skim the odd epithet or fulsome sentence from an unfavourable notice is as foolish as to complain that critics have failed to represent the show fairly in the first place.

The development is part of the strict application of yet more bonkers European Union legislation in the field of consumer protection. It’s doubtful that even the nannyish EU law-makers can make life as frustrating for theatre owners as they already have done for farmers and fishmongers. And Richard Pulford, President of SOLT, doubts that any current practice contravenes these new directives anyway.

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