Ironic, really, after all the theatrical razzmatazz of Edinburgh, that the best show of the summer for me was a musical in a pub theatre in Southwark. From that masterly study in emotional and cultural repression Remains of the Day, Alex Loveless has created a masterpiece made unforgettable in this Fallen Angel production. Stephen Rashbrook as the self-destructively servile butler Stevens is scarily convincing but the 14-strong company were all impressive: sharp script and libretto combined with brilliant ensemble acting, singing and dancing, was absolutely exhilarating. Complex wartime political intrigue is deconstructed in wittily inventive songlines and there's time for glamour and humour too but the poignancy of the story glimmers through the gaity as "life carries on remorseless". Mega congratulations to Alex and director Chris Loveless who well deserve the Evening Standard accolade that "A canny West End producer could do far worse than to tweak this fine show for a transfer."

Only the louch and lovely can rent these rooms begins the title poem of Sue Boyles new collection Too Late For The Love Hotel , launched in Bath this week by Sue 'and friends': an impressive line-up of bardic luminaries at an elegant gathering at the BRLSI. Introducing, Sue confessed to 'a certain sadness' when her innocent enquiry about staying with her husband at the Orient Hotel in Venice was rejected at reception with the tactful explanation that rooms here were let by the hour...
Sue's poems have been hailed by Andrew Motion as 'strange' and by her many admirers as delightfully inventive: the overall theme of this collection, she says, is 'the centrality of love'.

Still on the subject of thin volumes and social mores, I've been rereading Saki's satire on 19th Century London society The Unbearable Bassington. If you haven't met Comus Bassington, or Clovis Sangrail, imagine Wodehouse's picaresque Bertie Wooster stories with an underlying melancholy and fatalistic unease. HH Munro, aka Saki, was one of those Army children like Kipling sent back motherless from India to England at so tender an age the terror seems never to have left him. He died in the trenches in 1916, his final words "Put that bloody cigarette out' perversely appropriate for a writer with such deep understanding of destructive folly and tragic absurdity. His pen-sketches are brilliant: "A close-cut beard lent a certain dignity to his appearance - a loan which the rest of his features and mannerisms were successfully repudiating" he writes of one society character, and of another: "He was a skilled window-dresser in the emporium of his own personality." Almost Wildean....