Sheridan Morley

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.

The tills of the West End may be alive with the sound of musicals new and old, but the Brits on Broadway are remarkably well represented at a time when theatre in New York is still suffering a delayed downturn from the after-effects of 9/11. It is indeed some indication of a renewed faith in Broadway, and a reborn interest in straight plays which we could do well to copy, that David Hare is about to première his The Vertical Hour (with Julianne Moore and Bill Nighy, as directed by Sam Mendes) in New York rather than London, having recently triumphed there with his Iraq talkfest Stuff Happens.

It must have been some time in 1967: I was fresh (well, freshish) out of Oxford and had, rather to my amazement, been invited by Sir No.