And just as Peter Polycarpou’s cartoon bumbler Cheche is beginning to grate, he succeeds in pulling back the mask to deliver a couple of nasty shocks, to great dramatic effect.But where Tolstoy leads the reader through his epic story, making no judgement and calling for no blood, Cruz cannot resist editorialising, and these moments draw the play perilously close to the soap suds. A monologue on the death of hand-rolled cigars being emblematic of the passing of a gentler, better way of life blithely ignores the sweat-shop conditions and long hours of early mass production that kept the workers illiterate and in need of a lector in the first place.I seem to remember one review of the original Broadway production of 2003 damning it with faint praise as “moderately fascinating” That pretty much covers it: close – but no cigar To 8 January (020-7722 9301). Under his – and Julian’s – influence, poetic lines begin to waft from even the most unlikely characters, but are too often left to hang in the air that we may admire them.The director, Indhu Rubasingham, moves the busier scenes well – in the penultimate, party scene several vignettes are exposed deftly, with clarity and lightness of touch – but many scenes are ponderous. From there, it is inevitable that he should become Tolstoy’s Vronsky and beat a path to the smouldering Anna figure of Conchita (an outstanding Rachael Stirling).The factory becomes a sort of book group, with the women’s imaginations and passions aroused by Tolstoy. What is left behind on stage is Juan Julian, a swoon-worthy man in a white suit, who drives all the women wild (one fan wets herself at the mere sight of him) and all the men to surly inadequacy.Julian (Enzo Cilenti, who has little to work with but becomes a winning presence) elects to read Anna Karenina – from an edition with a suitably lurid dustjacket.

It is the late 1920s, and the lector is an important fixture in the industry: he reads to the (often illiterate) workers as they labour – from fiction, news, even political tracts that sing sedition to the ears of the bosses.
The socio-political importance of the figure, as not only entertainer but educator, is to be gleaned here only from a programme note. A new lector is employed at Santiago and Ofelia’s traditional Cuban-style cigar factory in Tampa, Florida, in Nilo Cruz’s Pulitzer prize-winning play Anna in the Tropics. He told her he was going home to work, as he was “struggling with a new play”. The actress fixed him with her basilisk stare and replied: “Aren’t we all!”An interviewer recently told her how great she looked “Oh please,” she said “Please I did look greater.”. When she was asked whether she would be taking it to Broadway, she replied: “Broadway? I wouldn’t take it to Woking.”On another occasion, the playwright Ronald Harwood stuck his nose nervously into her dressing-room when she was appearing, to only lukewarm applause, in his mediocre Interpreters, in 1985. Her scene-stealing made Olivier vow never to work with her again.She was unhappy with Nicholas Hytner’s production of The Importance of Being Earnest in 1993. It’s one of the reasons why her famous witticisms and insults are so cherished and so often impersonated in the theatre world.During her celebrated 1965 National Theatre appearance as Desdemona in Othello, Laurence Olivier, playing the Moor in dark make-up, complained about her accent “How now, brown cow?” she returned.

And in hearing us wish her a happy birthday she would surely start sniffing around for an ulterior motive.PRIME CUTS: THE WIT OF MAGGIE SMITHDame Maggie Smith’s brilliantly precise voice, with its nasal twang, can lend even the most unpromising lines a devastating wit. Dench tends to pay less attention to these things; she is in danger of resembling a sulky Native American in that unruly long grey wig.Smith steams on, ever wary of how she might appear, staring back at us with her head teasingly cocked and her lovely long neck straining slightly in disbelief Anxiety is the spice of her life and the fuel to her talent. I don’t think it too fanciful to see in both these great dames a renewed valour in their work, and in Maggie Smith I see new notes of charm and wisdom all the time.And then there are her costumes. She is quite magnificently attired in My House in Umbria in a succession of Italian haute couture summer dresses, suits and hats. She even makes a floral house-coat seem elegant in Ladies in Lavender. She forms a particular affection for an American girl who lost her parents, and, when a cold-fish uncle comes to collect her, she moves into another dimension of concern and, indeed, desperation.

Since Smith lost her second husband, the writer Beverley Cross (who died in 1998), she has, like Judi Dench (whose husband, Michael Williams, died in 2001), deferred sorrow by keeping busy. Even her Lady Bracknell in Nicholas Hytner’s 1993 production of The Importance of Being Earnest – the one which, when asked if she would take it to New York, she said she wouldn’t take to Woking – was less an imperious whirlwind than an exercise in a comic veneer that was crumbling into girlish vulnerability.One of her most underrated performances is in the recent film My House in Umbria (2003), adapted by Hugh Whitemore from a novella by William Trevor, in which she plays – again, a lonesome soul – a romantic novelist who blossoms as a caring hostess after a bomb blast on a train to Milan. In Arthur Pinero’s heart-warming backstage classic Trelawny of the Wells, she played Avonia Bunn not only in a fetching pair of fishnet tights but also, said John Higgins, as “a fourth-rate trouper with a heart as high as the Post Office Tower and a turmoil of emotions that runs from jubilation to despair in a matter of seconds”.So it has continued, with Smith defying us with every performance to think of her merely as a genius of comedy. Are you playing one of your saucy games, Mr Miller?”In the middle of this riot, Smith still tempered her revenge on her former lover with pathos and the threat of impending loneliness This became a trademark of her comedy. She gave a superb display of mischievous outrage, dressed only in a borrowed pyjama top, even impersonating an ancient Cockney char: “It’s as black as Newgate’s knocker up ‘ere. Miss Julie became the template for her later, great tragic performances culminating in the film of The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1988), the tale of a secret alcoholic battling with guilt against her sensuality, and her wonderful, similarly conflicted Susan in Alan Bennett’s “Bed Among the Lentils” in his television Talking Heads series.In Black Comedy – the funniest play since the war, until Michael Frayn’s Noises Off came along – scenes of confusion in complete darkness after a power cut were played in full light, Smith turning up to queer her camp ex-boyfriend’s new romantic pitch (Derek Jacobi was an outrageous antiques dealer). It is hard for those of us who saw Olivier’s company at the Old Vic – I used to pay three shillings to sit in the “slips” at the side of the upper circle, or two shillings to stand at the back of the stalls — to describe the heady excitement of seeing Olivier, Smith, Stephens, Colin Blakeley, Geraldine McEwan, Albert Finney and the rest, in play after play over seven or eight years.Smith was enchanting in Shakespeare as Desdemona and Beatrice.