from a private members' club with his young stepson through the streets of London to avoid arrest - only to find his wife and her sister arraigned before him in the dock the next morning as he presides over the local Magistrates' court, for being in exactly the same place that he'd been at. But Lithgow, watching the hypocrisies of his life tumble around him, isn't the only person around whom life's certainties are falling apart. His wife's desperate secret - that her 14 year old son by her first marriage is in fact all of 19 (and no wonder he therefore talks not once but twice of "swelling with expectation" when around a young woman, and already smokes, drinks and is a member of a private club) - is threatening to be exploded, too, by a visit from the boy's godfather. The roles of the wife and her son are blissfully taken by the wonderful Nancy Carroll and the pint-sized Joshua McGuire respectively. Carroll is one of our most seriously gifted comic actresses, a natural successor to Maggie Smith and Fiona Shaw but more comically truthful and less stylised than either. I've previously seen McGuire play Hamlet at Shakespeare's Globe. The London stage keeps turning out new stars, and both are destined for greatness. There's also a peach of a performance from Beverley Rudd as a buxom maid also much taken by McGuire's young Cis. But then the whole show is a testament to NT casting at its finest,