“We are guilty of liking words more than people,” Honor tells George, and it’s a charge that could be levelled at Murray-Smith, too.The characters chuck reproaches, apologies, declarations of passion and epigrams at one another in a mechanical fashion, and the progress of relationships is too pat. The smoothness is ruffled by the daughter, her distress well conveyed by Georgina Rich, but here the dialogue falls into patterns of hesitation and repetition straight out of the Mamet play-writing manual.Diana Rigg errs on the side of understatement, projecting a warmth and reasonableness you would not associate with her, but not the angst the drama needs. Confronting her rival, Honor asks what Claudia thinks will happen when she, too, looks old “I take care of myself,” answers Claudia “Time takes care of all of us,” says Honor, mournfully. Their comfortable existence is disrupted by the arrival of the beautiful, ambitious Claudia (Natascha McElhone), engaged in writing a profile of George. Before long, George is telling Honor that of course he still loves her, but he needs more than their marriage gives him, and she’s making speeches on the meaning of loyalty.
The great pleasure of the play is hearing how neatly these speeches are turned. As a result, no serious novelist will touch the subject with a bargepole, and the angst of NW3’s adulterers is left unchronicled Luckily, Joanna Murray-Smith’s play Honour fills the gap. The couple at the centre of the action are George (Martin Jarvis), a distinguished journalist, and Honor (Diana Rigg), who was, when young, a celebrated poet, but who gave it up in favour of motherhood and George’s career.

In fact, it started life as a play about adultery in Murray-Smith’s native Melbourne; but the location has been shifted to Hampstead to suit UK audiences, and seems to have lost nothing in translation. For decades, the stock sneer at the English novel was that it was preoccupied with “adultery in Hampstead”. As P F Duggan, he wrote television drama about police inquiries and counter-intelligence. So he should prove ideal casting as a man who keeps his cards close to his chest.. “I’ve worked out he speaks seven languages, and if he has more than one passport, we are definitely in Le Carr?ountry…”Malahide was born Patrick Duggan and changed his name because there was already a Patrick Duggan in Equity. The audience must be left with the ultimate unknowability of what happened, and that’s why it’s such an intriguing play and, hopefully, such a resonant one.”The script will no doubt give a good work-out to Irons’s richly mournful and melancholic voice, and the impenetrability of Konrad should be right up Malahide’s brutal alley. Malahide is not averse to sharing some of his decisions about Konrad with us: that he has been hiding things all his life and that the only way he could have crossed Europe in wartime was to have been related to the security forces in some way.

“It’s wonderful to be in one place for four months,” he agrees “The past two years have been crazy. I find myself gradually getting back in touch with theatre, and it’s lovely.”"Theatre is where the actor is ultimately in charge,” says Blakemore “We rehearse collaboratively I give the actors unwanted notes. They question them ["As nicely as possible," Malahide chips in]. But when it gets under way and the critics are in, it’s the actor finally up there calling the shots And that’s what draws us back. It’s not only pleasure; it’s the responsibility of making sure the audience are not shuffling about.”This play sets up a denouement and then deliberately disappoints us. But we are nostalgic for it.”Was Irons nostalgic, I ask, for a return to the routine of theatre? There are so many Irons in the fire of cinema these days that a quiet poke among the embers of theatre must make a nice change.