London diary; Adam Green spends a showstopping week on the West End.

Monday

fter a long flight, my girlfriend, Elizabeth, and I arrived at our hotel, Hazlitt's, in a state of Byronic dishevelment, which could also describe the hotel. I was soon summoned to meet Vanessa Redgrave for an interview about her upcoming return to Broadway in an adaptation of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking ("Flying Solo," page 564). Later, over dinner with friends at Electric House, I recounted how at one point I asked Redgrave, "Does what I said make any sense, or am I just blathering?" After a magisterial pause, she smiled benevolently and said, "A little of both."

Tuesday

This afternoon, we went to the National to see a thrillingly staged neo-Dickensian tale of orphans, mistaken identity, unspeakable cruelty, and the redemptive power of music, set in eighteenth-century Gloucester and London. Adapted by Helen Edmundson from a popular children's book by Jamila Gavin and gorgeously directed by Melly Still, Coram Boy, which will probably come to New York next month, ends with the cast singing "For Unto Us a Child Is Born," from Handel's Messiah. The weepy audience-which included Tonya Pinkins, from Caroline, or Change, and hundreds of schoolchildren-went mad with joy.

Even after Coram Boy, Frost/Nixon wasn't a letdown. Peter Morgan, who wrote the screenplay for The Queen, has fashioned a taut, witty look at the televised, winner-take-all showdown between the disgraced ex-president, played with shambling grandeur by Frank Langella, and the fading talk-show host, played with unctuous, swinging-seventies charm by Michael Sheen (Tony Blair in The Queen). After, Langella and I had dinner at the Ivy (Trevor Nunn, lately represented on the West End by Rock 'n' Roll and Porgy and Bess, was at the next table). Langella, who is looking forward to bringing the show to New York, told me about meeting Henry Kissinger at a dinner party. Kissinger asked him, "After all your research, what do you think about Dick?" Langella said, "I feel terribly sorry for him." Kissinger replied, "Me, too."

Wednesday

Nunn's intimate staging of Porgy and Bess is psychologically acute and a pleasure to look at, but it's got one little problem: The singing isn't very good. Shortchanging Gershwin's ravishing score by casting an actor who can't carry a tune as Porgy (the otherwise excellent Clarke Peters) can only be described as perverse.