Shakespeare & Co.

"Old men forget" is a line from Shakespeare's Henry V that even oldies hacks remember. Shakespeare knew that these words were only partly true. We, to our embarrassment, suffer from temporary oblivion of our own telephone numbers, lunch dates and the names of friends and former lovers. But if an actor recites a line of poetry or a musician plays a movement that we have once loved, our recall, and indeed our gratitude, is as strong as ever.

The Royal Shakespeare Company has, as a millennium project, given its grateful fans a season of the Bard's historical plays King John, Richard II, Henry IV (Parts I & II), Henry V, Henry VI (Parts I, II & III) and Richard III?a total of nine plays, or roughly 30 hours of your bum on a seat, happily spread over a long, cold, gray winter. With the parsimonious ration that the sainted editor allows me for this column I cannot do justice to the individual great performances, but I can tell you about the extraordinary sense of tribal affinity in the audience. A nation is the collective memory of its history, the shared defeats and triumphs as taught in the homes and schools of our childhood. The England I came to love as a foreign refugee during World War II no longer exists, and can only be recalled in a book or on the stage.

During these performances I found myself in a congregation of a persecuted minority, the once indigenous people of the British Isles. We know that there were surreptitious meetings of this kind among the friends of Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn in the Soviet Union, in the circle of Vaclav Havel in Communist Czechoslovakia, among the resistants to Nazism and with Christian martyrs of every denomination back to the Roman Empire.

In a Western democracy persecution takes a different and more insidious form. It is politically incorrect to discriminate against sexual, racial or immigrant minorities, but there is no such protection for the original indigenous population of the British Isles. The government has legislated the breakup of the geographical entities of the country, the teaching of grammar and spelling of English has been abolished in the schools, as well as the country's history and literature. The rural community is discriminated against, as it is more traditional and less malleable. The brainwashing, which in dictatorships was conducted by a Dr. Goebbels or the politburo, is just as effectively achieved by the inane entertainments on television, creating an electorate of addicts as pathetic as victims of heroin and crack. Dumbing down is more effective than prison in a democracy.

I had feared that the Almeida Theatre production of Wedekind's shocker, Lulu, was going to be too verismo. But their portrayal of the famous femme fatale is just cheesecake, very dishy, certainly suitable for the education of a young man, but not likely to lead to the perdition of any adult male.

The huge success of Felicity Kendall and Frances de la Tour in Noel Coward's Fallen Angels has tempted a courageous producer into mounting the same author's Semi-Monde. Alas, it is just a string of clever, cynical Coward bon mots with no real connecting storyline, unless you think having all the characters as lesbians, pederasts, gigolos and adulterers is enough of a plot. I was reminded of Alexander Korda's words after an unsuccessful screen test: "It isn't enough to be Hungarian, you have to have some talent too." The same goes for sodomy.

And the same goes for being Irish, but I must say that London is fortunate that the successors to Synge, O'Casey, Yeats and Joyce still use the English language. The National Theatre revived The Playboy of the Western World, which had a good run, since a lot of people thought it was a bio of my colleague Taki. The National also premiered Colin Teevan's interesting The Walls, and this reminds me of a good quote from Hugh Leonard's Dublin memoir: "The black dog was the only intelligent member of the family. He died a few years later. He was poisoned and no one will convince me that it wasn't suicide..." Now we get Shaw's Back to Methuselah, four hours of blarney, so I'll reserve it two lines.

I wish I could give two pages, not two lines to praise Shaw's contemporary, the inimitable Sir Max Beerbohm, critic and caricaturist. His Seven Men was brilliantly presented by the actor Jonathan Cecil at the Jermyn Street Theatre. Beerbohm would have loved David Mamet's latest play, Boston Marriage, and so would the great classical Greek poetess Sappho. In a setting straight from the Boston of Henry James, and with Zoe Wanamaker and Anna Chancellor as a pair of fond and fun ladies of quality, Mamet had me rolling in the aisles with repartee laced with early 21st-century bawdiness. Sold out, but invade your trust fund to buy a ticket.

Another lady of quality, this one new to me, is the playwright Moira Buffini, whose Loveplay is part of the Royal Shakespeare's group of new plays. It shows us the search for love, through time and history, with both wit and profundity. I saw this play in a matinee performance, which is perilous for me as I am really programmed for a siesta. I neither winked nor snored, and that, my girlfriend tells me, means that it was a very good play indeed. My girlfriend also asks me whether I really forget the names of former girlfriends. Of course I don't. I am just discreet.