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I think the Royal Shakespeare Company must be getting tired of people like me complaining about the trains from London to Stratford-upon-Avon. So, like the mountain coming to Mohammed, they are coming to us. No sooner had they announced an ambitious plan to take over New York's Armory next summer and turn it into a replica of their Courtyard Theatre, but they tell us they are coming to London in November with six full-scale Shakespeares, two children's cut-down Shakespeares, a cast of 44 in 228 roles, performing in yet another replica of the Courtyard, this time at the Round House, a dearly loved London space which used to be a railway turnaround and is now an innovatively designed theatre. While the RSC's home in Stratford is being rebuilt, they're spreading their wings and flying away to distant parts, well, London and New York are fairly distant, and, if all goes according to plan, there will be three functioning Courtyards by the middle of next year.

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	Nancy Carroll and Benedict Cumberbatch in After the Dance
	photo by Johan Persson

I really love what my husband used to called "carpets and curtains" plays — the ones that require lots of period costumes, great hats, and civilized people taking tea in the conservatory — so I never really cottoned to the kind of contemporary drama where two people are trapped in a non-existent set, wearing jeans and talking earnestly about Afghanistan. Just shallow, I guess.

But when was the last time you saw a new "carpets and curtains" play? Exactly, me neither. So imagine my delight in the discovery of After the Dance (National Theatre, until Aug. 11), a Terence Rattigan play I had never seen before. Rattigan was of the Noel Coward generation, and although he lived until 1977, and his better-known plays, The Deep Blue Sea and Separate Tables, are revived constantly, After the Dance, a big hit when it opened in 1939, hasn't been seen in London or anywhere for more than 60 years.

Set in the London flat of David and Joan, rich and apparently carefree, center of a circle of hedonistic friends, slightly past their sell-by date but still always up for another party, another new gimmick, another bit of salacious gossip, another cigarette and, inevitably, another drink. The balance is altered by the arrival of silly, superficial Helen, who heedlessly breaks up their marriage, forcing David to confront the unpleasant fact that if he continues to drink he will shortly die of cirrhosis of the liver. The brilliant and underrated Nancy Carroll turns in a smashing performance as Joan, the loving wife pretending not to care when a tramp displaces her, and Benedict Cumberbatch is urbane and tortured as the straying husband who thinks he'd rather be an historian than a wastrel. Sharing the honors for best performance in a conspicuously high-class cast is a brilliant Adrian Scarborough as the best friend who knows better.

Frocks are lovely, acting top-notch, and the sight of all these rich folks drinking themselves to death doesn't sicken so much as warn at a time when the philosophy of grabbing whatever you want, now, no matter at whose expense, is more prevalent even than it was in Rattigan's day.

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The frocks were pretty lovely at the saddest event I attended recently — the last ever performance at London's premier, no, only cabaret room, the Pizza on the Park. This black-tie evening was as studded with tears and diamonds as it was with stars. It was so easy to pass the door unnoticed; it was located below an upmarket pizza joint and you could actually sit upstairs and eat your pizza without having any idea that downstairs there were the cream of American and British cabaret artists singing their hearts out. It was appropriate that the final artist to play at the Pizza before the developers pull it down and build (oh joy) yet another hotel, was the classy American singer-pianist, Steve Ross, who has played the room (and sold it out) every year of the 27 it has existed. Karen Akers was here this week, so was Andrea Marcovicci, and an audience crammed with lovers of the songs of Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Dietz and Schwartz, George and Ira Gershwin, and all the other greats of the songwriting world. Now their voices are, I hope temporarily, silenced in London and the audience of addicts, in which I include myself, are cabaret orphans.