His distinction lay in never outgrowing the hatred and contempt that the normal teenager feels when confronted with adult human beings

His distinction lay in never outgrowing the hatred and contempt that the normal teenager feels when confronted with adult human beings”.Where does the assassin impulse come from? “It goes back to schooldays,” said Carey in a confessional rush. “I wasn’t very clever at school, early on, in Redcliffe-on-Trent in Nottingham, where we were evacuated during the war I wasn’t exactly thick, just not very interested. I was sceptical of the things people were trying to encourage me to be interested in… Then we moved back to London when I was 12, and I went to a marvellous grammar school in East Sheen, with two wonderful English masters, and things improved.”So that early scepticism turned into moral disapproval? “Yes, but I’d like to believe there was a cultural component too.

It seems to me that demanding you should revere this person or that is something that keeps art and culture away from a lot of people – because they think, ‘Is that what I’m supposed to revere? Forget it’. I once got a letter from the art critic Tim Hilton, after I’d been on some programme about Miro, on which I’d said it meant nothing to me. He wrote and asked, ‘Do you think any useful purpose is served by your remarks?’ I wrote back and said, ‘Yes, because I think people being forced to adulate what they don’t actually feel is a bad thing for culture’.”His anti-dons stance was the result of his early brush with Oxford in the late 1950s, when he was a lecturer at Christ Church. “Christ Church in those days was just like Brideshead, full of unbelievably rich young men, some clever, some not. The dons I was writing about were like Maurice Bowra, whom I admire for many things, but he’d be with his friends… Penguin has lost one of its great finds to Faber & Faber.

As a socialite and her mother, Mary Stockley and Susan Tracy not only look classy, but give these potentially stuffy roles plenty of spirit.One might complain that there are so many of Porter’s witty numbers that the show gets a bit choppy – several from his later shows have been added to the original score – but as Mae West said, “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.”Booking to 17 January (0870 890 1109). Sally Ann Triplett’s wise-cracking soul-saver recreates the pugnacious good humour of early-Thirties New York without turning it into caricature, and Martin Marquez (a gangster miffed at being only Public Enemy No 13) likewise reproduces the solemn-faced demeanour of the period’s clowns. The mere appearance of the unworldly Lord Evelyn, whose Easter Island face keeps being disconcerted by all sorts of emotions unknown to the English aristocracy, is a signal for anticipatory laughter, and his hymn to his hidden depths (“The Gypsy in Me”) nearly has the aisle-sitters, if I may speak for them, sliding to the floor.As the hero, John Barrowman combines looks with agility and a voice that gets the most out of the operatic “All Through The Night”. Whirling round and round in the frighteningly quick and precise moves demanded by an ensemble number, Simon Day, as an Englishman bowled over by the zest of his former colonials, still looks disbelievingly delighted and mouths “Mah-vellous!”Day, indeed, comes close to whirling off with the show. Each performer seems the perfect embodiment of his or her role, an effect wrought not just by casting but by Nunn’s pushing his actors to the limits of their talent and then some, and by being as inventive as he is obsessive.I have no idea why you should be looking at minor members of the crew when the leads are doing their stuff, but, if you are, you’ll see them being crew members down to the tips of their tap shoes. I generally frown on reporting opening-night reactions – relatives and backers will cheer the biggest turkey in the barnyard – but the full-throated roar that met several numbers and the longest standing ovation I’ve ever known were as sincere as they were just.Anything Goes isn’t perfect – tenderness and romance are nearly negligible in a show dedicated to raucous frivolity – but it is perfectly done.