That orthodoxy seems to be disappearing, or at least weakening. Not long ago Hytner explained the dominance of Left-leaning drama by the absence of what one might call Right-wing plays. But now Brenton, that firebrand of the Left and scourge of the establishment, has, in Never So Good, written what struck me as a rather Right-wing play, if there can be such a thing. It is certainly much more sympathetic to Macmillan than I would have been, and hugely more understanding of the establishment than Brenton used to be — and he got it on at the National, of all places. And this at a time when another formerly Leftist playwright, David Mamet, has announced that he is defecting to the Right because he is no longer a “brain-dead liberal”.

Never So Good is a better play than Shaw’s; it is more complex, more feeling, more sophisticated, more human and more truly theatrical. It is very much less naive and didactic. However, at times Brenton’s feeling for language is surprisingly weak. He makes Dorothy Macmillan tell her husband in 1939 that he is a “klutz”, a word which Macmillan repeats to himself after becoming prime minister in 1957. It is absolutely incredible that an upper-class Englishwoman should before the war use Yiddish slang that only came into more general use in America, let alone here, in the 1960s. Nor is it likely that Macmillan would have used it; any­one of middle age, with a good ear for his native language, ought to have sensed that unconsciously.

Similarly Brenton has Macmillan saying to Eisenhower in 1957, of Yorkshire pudding and spotted dick, “we call it comfort food”. This is an American expression of a much later date, sometime in the 1970s, which crossed the Atlantic more recently still.