Back to Dench, who has come in for some rather rude suggestions that (a) the greatest classical actress of her generation is no judge of scripts and (b) that her ankle injury – resulting in the star’s absence from a spate of performances soon after opening – may have been a ruse to get her out of a play she didn’t like and in which she could not always remember her lines. Sound familiar? Similar aspersions (minus the memorisation bit) beset Dench’s great friend and exact contemporary Maggie Smith when Dame M. returned to the London theater two years ago after an even longer absence to star in Edward Albee’s scorching The Lady From Dubuque, at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. That play was fairly roundly trounced and, against all expectation, did disappointing business, making negative waves as the first Smith venture anyone could think of not to recoup costs.

Well, I come not to bury these women but to praise them, as I do a British theatrical ethos that within the acting community itself values the new and/or unfamiliar over the old, even if you sometimes sense critics would be happier with an eternal diet of King Lear, The Cherry Orchard, and Hedda Gabler. (Hey, I love those plays, too, but not to the exclusion of all others.) It was both surprising and heartening during the 1980s to find two late, much-missed talents, Paul Scofield and Wendy Hiller, lending their formidable strengths to two American works, I’m Not Rappaport and Driving Miss Daisy, respectively, that inevitably drew sneers from observers who couldn’t get beyond the fact that Scofield was no longer playing Lear and that Hiller had more weapons in her arsenal than merely another retread as Lady Bracknell; even Laurence Olivier chose a relatively modest entry, a new play by Trevor Griffiths called The Party, as his last-ever theatrical venture, when it could easily have been, oh I dunno, Lear’s Gloucester or Chekhov’s Firs. In fact, Smith’s occupancy of the title role in Lady From Dubuque is one of the few recent performances that I actually chose to see twice, the final Saturday matinee of the play’s run forever with me as an example of a peerless actress in perfect command of her art: Smith played the mysterious visitor of the title with not a trace of artifice, her final questioning of the audience a shimmering moment that haunts me still.

Madame de Sade is an altogether different kettle of sexually aberrant fish, and I’d be lying if I didn’t at times feel that the six incredibly talented women on stage were working themselves into a fever pitch, abetted by Adam Cork’s busy, buzzy sound design, that the material itself didn’t always warrant. But as always with Dench, her very arrival some way into the first scene stilled an expectant house that no doubt got an immediate kick from a wig that wouldn’t be out of place in the finale of Hairspray, the actress’s inbuilt gravitas pausing on occasion to let us know that she was in on the overripeness of it all, too.

And yet, I wouldn’t have missed for the world a production that is considerably riskier than Grandage‘s previous Twelfth Night, which was itself led from the front by a senior actor in Derek Jacobi’s Malvolio playing it notably safe, and for ready shtick, in a way Dench and Smith would never do. (Jacobi doesn’t always do it, either, as those who saw his ferocious star turn under Grandage’s watch in Schiller’s Don Carlos can surely attest.) But as I ponder the varieties of opprobrium that have been slung toward Madame de Sade and its distinguished cast (“crud” and “higher tosh” stand out among the slings and arrows), one has to wonder whether the critics weren’t taking their own leaf from de Sade and gleefully cracking a poison-tipped whip that they generally keep at their feet. Let’s just hope that Dench’s recovery from injury at home isn’t leaving her too much time to read the papers. We want this woman back on this stage, any stage, as soon and as often as possible. And for those for whom an all-female take on an absent hero is just too much – the Marquis de Sade is spoken of but never seen – just hold tight. Grandage’s next play at Wyndham’s is Jude Law in Hamlet in which the title character – spoiler ahead! – does indeed appear.

The fact is, Richardson was that rare London talent who gave herself over pretty entirely to the Broadway theater and left a grateful American public in thrall to her every stage appearance – and in very real mourning now. Lots of British performers triumph on Broadway, scooping up Tonys on the way. But how often have Pauline Collins, Stephen Dillane, Jeremy Irons, and Janet McTeer, to name just a few, returned to Broadway since they made their marks and won their prizes? In the case of the first two, not once, while Irons and McTeer are only back on Broadway this season, in Irons’s case a full quarter-century since he stormed 45th Street in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing.

Richardson actually was the real thing – a theater artist by not divine but genetic right who loved the Broadway community and let New York know it: after all, money aside, O’Neill, Marber, Williams, and Masteroff, Kander and Ebb are considerably more rewarding – aren’t they? – than remakes of The Parent Trap. The point is, a lot of performers would have retreated happily to the wings following the astonishing success Richardson had in the Sam Mendes/Rob Marshall Roundabout Theatre revival of Cabaret, her Sally Bowles in every way a repudiation of the celebratory take on the part so famously proffered on screen by Liza Minnelli: I’ll never forget Richardson’s hair-raising reappraisal of the show’s title song, delivered as the last, desperate gasp of a fantasist in thrall to the forces of the Third Reich gathering around her. Jane Horrocks had attempted something of the same coup de theatre when Mendes mounted an earlier version of the same musical at London’s Donmar Warehouse, but it took someone of Richardson’s talent to sell the deeply neurotic sizzle via a Sally who broke your heart, all the while suggesting that something deep within her was broken, too.

But far from vanishing from view to tend to her much-deserved Tony, Richardson was back on the New York stage the very next season, lending an effortless allure and – a wonderful paradox, this – a coolly defining heat to the Broadway debut of Patrick Marber’s wonderful Closer, a play co-produced by the very man, Robert Fox, to whom Richardson had been married when she made her Broadway debut in Anna Christie for the Roundabout opposite Neeson, who then became her second husband. Even that shift in spouses made sense, given Richardson’s fervor for New York. In Fox, Richardson had a partner who, like herself, was part of a theater family, with all the aesthetic and emotional pros and cons that phenomenon brings with it. Neeson, by contrast, was from Irish stock of an altogether different sort, and he no doubt represented maritally much the same freedom Richardson revelled in when she spoke of New York, a town where she could very much forge her own career without always being shadowed by that of her mother. (Or Aunt Lynn, though, as it turns out, Lynn Redgrave was one of Richardson’s fellow Tony nominees for Best Actress in 1993 when both women lost to the late Madeline Kahn, for The Sisters Rosensweig.)

With family dynamics in mind, it was particularly moving to hear that Richardson and Redgrave were planning to reteam for a full Broadway revival of A Little Night Music, having appeared at the start of this year in a one-off benefit of the 1973 musical. Enough time had clearly elapsed that both women could share a Broadway stage with equally moving grace and heft – Redgrave now a semi-regular visitor to a street from which she had been too long absent during the late ’70s and most of the ’80s, Richardson the next generation who conquered Broadway her first time out (in Anna Christie) and kept doing so throughout.

At this point, following Richardson’s all too surreal death, it’s hard not to think of Redgrave’s own recent stage appearance in The Year of Magical Thinking, playing a woman who has lost both a husband and a daughter, as Redgrave herself now has. If Richardson’s passing seems particularly unthinkable in the Manhattan where the actress lived, it’s because life, in cruelly imitating art, has snatched from its midst an erstwhile British visitor to New York who with time became a beloved and invaluable Broadway mainstay.

And that is so. Whereas the Oliviers were once televised to BBC audiences who numbered in the vicinity of seven million, that long ago ceased to be the case, London’s nearest equivalent to the Tonys looking on as the show was alternately truncated, delayed for transmission until a later slot (or even a subsequent night), and, eventually, dropped altogether, viewership by that point having slipped below the psychologically crucial threshold of one million.

Now, the gala dinner-cum-entertainment functions probably as the Oscars and their like used to in the days, pre-television, when Hollywood’s biggest night was essentially an industry confab with food and drink to calm frayed nerves. And while that’s no bad thing necessarily, one wonders why some sort of other outlet can’t be found, in an internet age where perhaps the entire show could be streamed on line or perhaps some interested (and deep-pocketed) cable or satellite channel could pick up the slack. It may sound preposterous, but I for one can’t help but feel that an American specialist broadcaster might generate a sizable audience for the Oliviers, even though the annual shindig focuses on London theater, ballet, and opera at the exclusion of work from around the regions or productions only seen States-side. The fact is, enough of London’s cultural diet has a recognizable ring overseas that theater buffs in New York and elsewhere would by no means feel left out of the party. And August: Osage County – the place name consistently mispronounced by nominee reader David Suchet, by the way – was, after all, up for a slew of prizes and won for Todd Rosenthal’s set.

How many musical theater mavens the world over, for instance, would kill to have seen the richly deserving actor/actress in a musical winners, Douglas Hodge and Elena Roger, strutting their stuff in solo performance stints at the Oliviers, both in superlative form. For erstwhile La Cage Aux Folles star Hodge, who delivered the most achingly truthful “I Am What I Am” that I have ever heard, the evening was especially bittersweet since the performer’s father had died exactly three days earlier. “I wasn’t going to come [to the ceremony], and my mom phoned me and said, `If you don’t go, I’ll never forgive you; he would love you to go.’” It turned out, too, that Hodge senior had shifted 180 degrees in his personal view of his son’s trophy-bearing role as Albin, aka the drag artiste Zaza. “When I was offered the part, if I’m honest, my dad said, `I don’t think you should do it: what’s it going to be — distasteful? sleazy?’” an emotional Hodge told me at evening’s end. “And it won him over; the show won him over because it’s about family and love and commitment and long relationships: everything he believed in. It breaks my heart that he’s not here tonight.”

It breaks my heart that no one outside the hotel itself got the full sweep of a night compered by the inimitable James Nesbitt, the cheeky Irish actor who kept a lengthy evening swinging along (a dinner interval included) without evident use of an autocue (and, presumably, none of the sort of earpiece assistance so favored by Richard Dreyfuss of late at the Old Vic). I was very sorry that The Norman Conquests didn’t win anything, though there was recompense after a fashion in the stupendously moving special award that was given to its author, Alan Ayckbourn, in recognition of a prolific career that is quite simply without peer. And co-presenting the prize (with Ayckbourn regular Liza Goddard), Old Vic supremo Kevin Spacey quite sensibly opted this time to shake the playwright’s hand, lest we get a repeat of the incident at the end of the trilogy’s triumphant press day last fall when Spacey’s overenthusiastic bear hug sent the enfeebled scribe tumbling into the first row of the audience.

The speeches were virtually without fail graceful and gracious, Jacobi considerably more touching as he fondled his Olivier – paying rich tribute to the trophy’s namesake – than he was as Malvolio in Twelfth Night. Indeed, even though I didn’t agree with some of the choices of winners, it was worth their moment in the spotlight to hear what they had to say. “I’m so excited! I’m sorry; I’m American,” enthused Zorro’s visiting Yank, Lesli Margherita, who copped the prize for outstanding supporting performance in a musical. Margherita then went on to proclaim of her cast with disarming candour, “I love, like, 95% of you.” One assumes the remaining five percent took the implicit knock with an oh-so-British stuff upper lip.

But it was with a view towards seeing tomorrow’s exciting theatrical prospects today that I seized the opportunity the other week to spend four days as one of that same number of adjudicators (three American, one British, London impresario and Durham Univ. graduate Giles Ramsay) at the 34th Durham Drama Festival in the ceaselessly stunning northern English cathedral town. Well, that and the prospect to relive however briefly my own university days, since Yale itself utilises the very system of residential colleges found at Durham and, well before that, at Oxford and Cambridge, the scholastic elder statesmen that pioneered this particular collegiate model.

Unlike Yale, Durham rather surprisingly doesn’t offer any proper study in drama, which makes the activities of its theater-minded students even more a labor of love. Hearing about campus productions of Company and The Pillowman reminded me very much of my years in New Haven, when the likes of Pal Joey, Fiddler On the Roof, Equus, and Waiting For Godot would be mounted, often for three or four nights only, the casts at the time including such eventual Tony winners as Victoria Clark, Michael Cerveris, and David Hyde Pierce, to name but a few. Pierce’s fellow tramp in a Trumbull College staging of Godot was none other than a then-unknown Bronson Pinchot.

It’s invidious and unfair to guess which of a first-rate assemblage of Durham actors, most of them age 20 give or take a year, will end up going the distance, though one of them, an actor-singer named Matt Johnson, already has a place studying music in London once he finishes his Durham degree. (Johnson is also writing a thesis on Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along, which he will be directing this summer.) But on the basis of the eleven shows I caught during my visit, the talent exists in spades. A 30-year-old PhD candidate from the Irish city of Cork, Donnchadh O’ Conaill, wrote the play that we judged to be the best of the lot, a witty and affecting solo piece wonderfully titled Interior Designer of My Own Downfall – clearly the contemporary theater’s equivalent, in the nomenclature sweepstakes, to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Its gratifyingly unself-conscious cast of one, Ben Salter, was named best actor at the event, having reportedly won the same award last year, as well: a third win next year and Salter will have pulled off a hat trick not even accomplished by Tom Hanks at the Oscars.

There was much else to praise, as well, starting with O’Conaill’s deadpan gifts as performer during an afternoon of comedy and a delicious improvised musical on the closing night entitled The Chair, The Dog, and The Monkey Named Harry that easily bested such recent London lulus as Imagine This and Marguerite – though that, I realize, is faint praise indeed for a show that was effortlessly smart and fresh. Through it all, Festival Director Oscar Blustin made his gracious, seemingly imperturbable way, on the final night receiving a standing ovation from a packed-out university theater whose thirst for drama was evident across any and all conversations, no matter how late into the night. And not just drama: the dining hall of my elegant Durham Castle digs within minutes of the town’s surpassingly beautiful 11th-century Cathedral was mounting a buzzed-about production of Bizet’s Carmen.

I very much liked a play called Orange Peel (though cut the coda!) by a 19-year-old, James Morton, and found myself casting company member Tessa Coates as Honey in a purely hypothetical Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in which the same student play’s leading lady, Stevie Martin, could well make a formidable Martha. Will such events come to pass? Who can say, though budding professional director Blustin is preparing a summer tour of Twelfth Night, auditions for which had some of the group in an amiable tizz. The pleasure in Durham lay in watching so much embryonic passion for the theater come to the fore, and why not? A life in the theater, to coopt the title of a David Mamet play, is a good one in no matter what capacity, and it is with great pleasure that I welcome these students to it.

Telling of five spinster sisters inhabiting the same tumultuous Ballybeg, Co. Donegal, household in 1936, Lughnasa indeed benefits from the careful attention afforded it from Mackmin, who is quietly growing into one of Britain’s most confident and compassionate directors: her West End incarnation last year of David Eldridge’s Under the Blue Sky was one of the glories of 2008, its absence from the year-end handing out of gongs puzzling to this day.

For one thing, you get a real sense here of the physical intimacy between the Mundy sisters and the way in which they act in differing ways as one another’s protectors. There’s a natural ease between Niamh Cusack’s ready quipster Maggie and Michelle Fairley’s wrenching schoolteacher Kate that finds the two eldest of the five readily intertwining arms as if to buttress themselves against the cruel world that Peter McDonald’s narrator, Michael – a surpassingly empathic performance – tells us about at wounding length. Elsewhere, when the “simple” sister Rose (Simone Kirby) returns from an assignation, her bespectacled sibling, Agnes (Susan Lynch), pauses to do up her blouse before reintroducing her to an anxious household: a small but telling detail in a production full of the same.

It’s not that a male director is innately incapable of such feeling: Mason’s production made considerably more, for instance, of the sheer ecstasy informing the sisters’ first-act dance – a moment that, for many spectators, the original Tony winning production never again matched. One could argue, however, that Mackmin is right not to present the dance as such an obvious set piece; there’s no opportunity, for instance, for this image of momentary release to garner applause in the way that it sometimes did all those years ago. (Hard to believe I first saw this play in 1990, since it has stayed with me so completely in the nearly two decades since.)

But I don’t recall that earlier go-round providing such a full sense of a household knitted together by care and concern even as it is about to become undone altogether. And near the end, when Michael in his reveries reaches across the divide of memory to stroke the chin of his mother, Chris (Irish singer Andrea Corr in a notable stage debut), a single gesture serves to encapsulate the reservoirs of feeling coursing through a play that leaves you floating in accordance with the language of Michael’s gently exalted final speech.

Are women directors therefore condemned only to do delicate, “intimate” work, leaving the more macho requirements of the job to their male colleagues? Not at all. Easily the most testosterone-fuelled National Theater production in recent years was Marianne Elliott’s summer, 2007, production of Saint Joan, much of the excitement of which came from the play’s lone female, star Anne-Marie Duff, fully holding her own amidst a rabidly blokish ensemble. I’d put money on Duff’s performance being less compelling without Elliott on hand to drive at, just as the presence of Phyllida Lloyd at the helm redoubled the power of her Mary Stuart leads, Janet McTeer and Harriet Walter: let’s hope that magic is retained for the Schiller revival’s forthcoming Broadway run.

In the meantime, London has a new Lughnasa to treasure, which must surely have a life beyond its limited run. (The play is scheduled to close May 9.) But when those stage sisters – and the fine trio of men in the cast, as well – come together for their bows, you’d be well advised to imagine another woman up there bowing with them: Mackmin, a director in superlative control of a play about the last summer before a family’s life was overtaken by chaos.