I'm the 46th Most-Popular London Guest

Our political masters and their spin doctors are avid readers of opinion polls. I read them with skepticism, but in 2001 the Tatler, a Conde Nast publication, voted me Number 46 on their list of the 100 most popular guests in London. I had improved from being Number 80 the year before.

This puts me in a terrible quandary. My records show that in 2001 I went to 73 plays in London alone, not including operas. Now, if I go on doing this so that I will be able to write about it for my faithful readers, I may have to skip some of those freebie cocktail parties for the launch of a new miraculous deodorant. The society column hacks and their sidekicks, the paparazzi, will notice my absence and I shall be demoted from the glorious Number 46. I could even slip off the list altogether. I can see the headlines on the front pages: "CLAUS DISGRACED." Indeed, there may even be a number of premature obituaries in the upmarket broadsheets. Maybe I should've made a New Year's resolution about this matter.

Meanwhile, here are some of last month's plays. Luther, by John Osborne, was revived at the National Theatre with Rufus Sewell in the lead. As I am myself a convert from the Joyless Danish Lutheranism of my birth to sunny Mediterranean Catholicism, I am reluctant to listen to Luther's harangues against Rome, and his equally uninspiring complaints about his chronic constipation. I saw Luther first many years ago with Albert Finney in the lead. In fact I think Osborne's reputation as a playwright was in some measure due to his luck in getting great actors for the first runs: Alan Bates in Look Back in Anger, Laurence Olivier in The Entertainer. Happy memories!

I was too young when George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber launched their fictional bio of the Barrymore dynasty on Broadway, The Royal Family. It has now been revived at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, London's most beautiful theater. It has a glittering cast of Judi Dench, Harriet Walter, Toby Stevens and Peter Bowles, and it is directed by Sir Peter Hall. But not even this cornucopia of mammoth talents can save the play. It is dated, which I don't mind because so am I. Sadly it is also an incessant and unrelenting portrait of hysterical, egomaniacal, discombobulated thespians. The cast must have had fun, but I didn't. I treasure my rare theater evenings with my daughter, but in the interval we voted unanimously for the exit.

The National Theatre celebrated its 25th Anniversary in the concrete South Bank bunker with The Chain Play, a "one-off" event. As the title indicates, it is in the form of the old house-party game with every scene written by a different author, among them Patrick Marber, Moira Buffini, Jonathan Harvey, Frank McGuinness, Charlotte Jones and, with a celebratory song, Stephen Sondheim. It was fun guessing who had written which scene. My girlfriend, who is a real pro as theater critics go, guessed most of them correctly. Brian Friel's Faith Healer was revived at the Almeida, and is another kind of guessing game, of the Rashomon formula. Three characters, each of them brilliantly cast, address the audience in successive monologues with their versions of events and their relationships. Where is the truth?

The tiny Riverside Studio produced one more guessing game. The authors' bios are truly impressive: Carl Djerassi, the father (if that is not an oxymoron) of the birth control pill, and Roald Hoffmann, Nobel Prize winner and professor of chemistry at Cornell. The play is called Oxygen and takes place within two time frames. At first you see some scientists in the Nobel Academy in the year 2001, the centenary of the first Nobel Prize. It has been decided to give one special prize to a scientist in the earlier centuries, whose discovery was of unique importance to mankind. They opt for oxygen, since it led to all modern chemistry. The audience then meets the three claimants: Scheele, a pathetic little Swede; Priestley, a rigid English Unitarian minister; and the glamour-boy, the elegant Frenchman Lavoisier, the ultimate winner. I frankly only recalled the name of Lavoisier, and that's because of the splendid double portrait of him and his wife by David in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It is an exciting science thriller, comparable to Michael Frayn's very successful Copenhagen and Poliakoff's Blinded by the Sun.

A visit to the tiny New End Theatre also brought one back to an earlier century with Chatterton, the life, love and tragic death of the poet, whose recumbent portrait is probably the most popular postcard at the National Gallery. The play is inspired by Alfred de Vigny's original and is part of a quartet of short plays by Tom Kempinski, who wrote the very successful Duet for One. The director is the very young and very talented Diana Hillier. The bad guy, as in many plays and movies, steals center stage (but who am I to complain about that?).

My grandchildren are sadly still too young for me to drag to the theater, but to get into training I went to the Royal Shakespeare production of Alice in Wonderland. It is full of special effects so as to compete with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Sadly, however, and for the same deplorable box-office reasons, most of Lewis Carroll's wonderful lines have been set to music, making them frequently inaudible. Just a bit more of Lloyd Webber Wonderland. I therefore refused to see (and hear) the Royal Shakies' production of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.