Winston Churchill, that lover of the English language, is made to say of Duff Cooper that “ he must join we happy dissenters”: that grammatical mistake is a schoolboy howler for which Churchill, Macmillan and Cooper would all probably have been beaten. These lapses of the ear matter because this play is trying to recreate an intellectual and emotional climate which is within living memory and which these errors undermine.

It’s also said by some historians that Brenton has been unduly free with both facts and emphases. If so, that matters much less than language, but I suspect it may be part of the same imaginative weakness.

At least one can say that the play’s weaknesses and strengths have nothing to do with the orthodoxy of which Brenton was part. Good playwriting is independent of politics; it has a dimension above any political demarcations and orthodoxies of the day, which is why everyone lays claim to Shakespeare. That demands great talent which is always rare and certainly so today. However, I hope in this column to discover myself wrong, starting with fringe theatre.