Plague over England *** (uncut)

Theatre critics don’t often write plays – they’re far too busy picking holes in work that others have poured their life and soul into in the hope of a favourable notice. In almost two decades of reviewing for the Evening Standard, Nicholas de Jongh has made more than his fair share of bitchy comments, but, after a sell-out season at the tiny Finborough last year, his play about Sir John Gielgud’s brush with the law has made it into the West End.

The famous thespian was accused of importuning for immoral purposes when he was caught cottaging in 1953, not long after he’d been knighted. De Jongh surrounds this real event (and the emotional impact it had on the usually discreetly homosexual Gielgud) with various fictional characters including the enticing “pretty policeman” who arrests him in a public lavatory, the judge’s son who witnesses the event and is equally seduced, and a civil servant considering electrical aversion therapy as a means of changing his forbidden sexual preferences.

Michael Feast, looking spookily like Gielgud and capturing his mellow tones, brings both gravitas and vulnerability to the pivotal role, John Warnaby doubles effectively as a camp critic and an intolerant Home Secretary, and, although the writing is competent rather than inspired (some of the jokes are decidedly laboured), overall De Jongh offers an interesting and entertaining account of a not so distant era when even private acts of gay sex could result in criminal prosecution.

Duchess, Catherine Street, WC2 ( 0844 579 1973)
Until 16^th May (£46-£26)