Late Tuesday afternoon, on an unseasonably warm day in London’s West End, 800 or so of Britain’s finest actors, directors, and the type of people who like to say they hang out with Britain’s finest actors and directors shuffled into the Grand Connaught Rooms, an ornate event space usually reserved for weddings and funerals.
Two and a bit hours later, that same procession of men in cucumber-and-salmon ties wandered out into the evening light. Red-faced and beleaguered, their specific patina could be attributed to either fury or merriment in a proportion of roughly 59.98 percent to 41.02 percent.
