Cocktail Sticks continues the ruminations of childhood and the capacity of dead parents to evoke memories of grief and irritation in equal part. Gabrielle Lloyd plays Lilian Bennett here, nervously pulling her salmon pink cardigan across her bosom as if it were body armour, and Jeff Rawle is Bennett's butcher dad, the sort of chap evoked when today's politicians gently patronise "people who work hard and play by the rules". But Lilian reads Beverley Nichols (who then played the role that her son would one day occupy) in Woman's Own and hankers for a distant world of cocktail parties and repartee, while having access to neither.

The embarrassment of the socially mobile is richly evoked in Nicholas Hytner's production through minute gestures, hesitations and irritations. When Alan's parents visit him at Oxford, he treats them to a cursory tour of his college, lest they embarrass his friends (or rather, him). The shame experienced then, he confesses, is far outdone by that of recalling in maturity the casual cruelties we mete out to those who love us most. 

Bennett scorned the late Margaret Thatcher, whom he blamed for many of Britain's ills, at least those diagnosed by the literati of Primrose Hill. Yet it's hard not to see parallels with his Tory contemporary in his own rise from provincial grammar school to iconic stature, and in his father a Yorkshire version of Alderman Roberts.

Mrs T's passing unleashed a long-promised argument about how horrible people are allowed be about the departed. British theatre has never had much of a good word to say about the leaderene, alive or dead. I put that point recently to Hytner on Radio 3's Night Waves (it's still online if you like a good row). He disagrees, claiming that the full range of political discussion is represented at the National Theatre he runs and elsewhere. I doubt this. Political theatre is far more comfortable with the 1960s and 1970s than what people voted for subsequently.