Returning to a bygone age

Now that the pleasure of conveying news, views and feelings by posted letters has given way to the impersonal brevities of the email and text message, The Best of Friends serves a rare, nostalgic purpose.

Hugh Whitemore's adaptation of the 20th-century letters that passed for decades between George Bernard Shaw, Fitzwilliam Museum director Sir Sydney Cockerell and Dame Laurentia McLachlan, the Abbess of an enclosed convent, enables us to appreciate bygone ages: telephones still rang rarely then, close friendships or even love affairs were sustained by letter and could survive death, thanks to their epistolary expression.

Strictly speaking this entertainment, which marked Sir John Gielgud's farewell to the theatre as Sir Sydney in 1988, lacks plot and action.

Yet for all the courteous trivialities and high-minded gossip of their correspondence, dramatised within Simon Higlett's evocative recreation of Cockerell's study, there develops a touching sense of friendship ripening, harvested and stoically declining in the fadings of old age.

James Roose-Evans, Hampstead's founder in 1959 and its first artistic director, celebrates a long overdue return to his theatre in a production imaginatively if perhaps too frequently animated with business.

Patricia Routledge's irritatingly winsome, chuckling Abbess stores apples, delivers posies and even escapes her grilled confines to visit London and Michael Pennington's Sir Sydney, whom this versatile actor makes the model of antique elegance and civility.

Roy Dotrice's superbly flamboyant, iconoclastic Shaw injects welcome touches of radicalism and vitality.

Of drama there is just a flash: arrogant Dame Laurentia displays a religious intolerance and eagerness to censor that strikes familiar bells today, when she demands Shaw arrange for the pulping of what she considers his blasphemous novel, Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God.

The Best Of Friends