The importance of being British

Sheridan Morley died suddenly last weekend. He was The Spectator’s theatre critic from 1990 to 2001. His knowledge of both the stage and its leading practitioners was encyclopedic, while his many theatrical anecdotes were hugely entertaining. He and his wife, the producer and critic Ruth Leon, were planning to spend more time shuttling between London and New York, from where he was going to send occasional reviews. What follows is the first — and now sadly the last — in the planned series. Sheridan was a good friend of The Spectator. We will all miss him a lot.

The business of Broadway is still a cash business. The politics are that anything with a ‘made in the UK’ tag still sells like nothing else. Consider the current snob hit at the Lincoln Center, Tom Stoppard’s three-part Coast of Utopia, which premièred at the National five years ago. A ticket for that will cost you on average $100.