Tony Awards Live 4

Just heard someone behind me on the phone to their mother, telling her that they just saw Cynthia Nixon. “What? No, Mom, not President Nixon, Cynthia Nixon!”

Nixon was pleasant and bland, talking about shoes (hers are comfortable so that she can last the longest at the afterparty), singing lessons and the need to nurture new writing, which seems to be the buzz phrase of the evening.

Alan Bennett came! He is so sweet. Bowtie crooked. Still here, talking in a very bumbling and bashful fashion about the success of the play and what he’s doing next. Last time he was on Broadway with a play was in 1962, with Beyond the Fringe, (“before any of you were born, I’d imagine,” he says to the room of journalists, making the considerable quotient of fiftysomethings in here very well disposed to him indeed, I’d imagine. "I haven't followed the history of the Tonys since," the '60s, he observes. "I had no idea it had become such a big deal." A reporter puts his hand up to congratulate him on the fact that The History Boys has just tied the record for most Tonys won (6) by a single play. Bennett clearly doesn't believe him - Angels in America, he thinks, holds the title. Turns out the journalist was right.

Bennett's not working on another play, because he gets so many letters about his memoir, Untold Stories, that he spends all day replying to them (“it’s not a joke, really”) and he’s unlikely to be bringing his play The Lady in the Van, to New York unless Maggie Smith comes – and she won’t come, she says, unless he plays himself in it. And he gets stagefright now, he says. “I don’t think I’d even be able to play myself.”