So there I was at the Royal Court Theatre, heading to the loos and who was standing over by the bar? Yep, you've guessed it, Mr Whishaw.
Now those with their finger on the pulse of London theatre-land will quickly point out the he had good reason to be at the theatre as he was taking part in a one-off read-through of a Caryl Churchill play as part of a season celebrating her 70th birthday. But ahh, I say, shouldn't he have been back stage preparing, doing voice exercises, putting powder on his nose or whatever it is that thesps do 15 minutes before curtain up?
Stalking I tell you, stalking.
And as a result he didn't have time to brush his hair before he got on stage or put on shirt that had all the buttons sewn on (I know it was only a read through and therefore there are no costumes but you are sitting on stage in front of several hundred people).
Luckily Miranda Richardson, who was also performing, was wearing the most bizarre outfit which included purple trousers and very strange yellowy-brown floppy boots that quite held me transfixed for much of the 'play', which was called Ice Cream and was excellent by the way.
The other actors weren't that much better particularly Hattie Morahan's scarlet snakeskin cowboy boots teamed with black skinny jeans and black cardie which were equally distracting. Gok Wan would have had a field day.
And while I'm here, I just like to comment on who lifted the stone that all the actors live under because they were out in force. Nobody mega famous mainly loads of familiar faces from the telly. The only one I can name is Eddie Redmayne who is currently playing Angel in the marvellous BBC adaptation of Tess of the D'Urbervilles.
I think other than myself and a small gaggle of Whishaw fans the rest of the audience seemed to be made up of wannabe thesps. Snatches of conversations I overhead almost invariably included tales of auditions and which actors in audience were in what or had been. And then there was the air kissing...
