I have always striven as a critic not to allow my personal circumstances, or any personal agenda, to intrude into what I write. Charles Spencer, the chief drama critic of the Daily Telegraph, evidently has no such scruples. Many times over nearly a decade, since his first admission in print that he was a drunk and was being helped by Alcoholics Anonymous, there have been mentions in his reviews of his former addiction and the organisation that was keeping him to stay dry.

Yesterday’s Telegraph contained another – in a wildly intemperate review of David Hare’s play My Zinc Bed, which I write about today on Page 9 (we were in the same audience at a preview performance in Northampton on Monday). Spencer writes: “It’s not just a bad play. It is a wicked one, too” (which statement was also splashed across the front page above the masthead). He complained that the play made AA “sound only marginally less sinister than the Mafia” and “could actively deter those with a drink problem from seeking their best chance of recovery”.

Now I am quite sure that David Hare can put up his own defence and probably will. I merely observe that my own view of the play could hardly be more different from Spencer’s. I had actually contemplated writing in my review that My Zinc Bed was an extremely good advertisement for AA.

Disobliging remarks about the organisation are put into the mouth of one character (clearly something of a nutcase) who is trying to persuade another – who has successfully dried himself out – to give up membership and return to what he believes would be controllable drinking. Paul Peplow (Jamie Parker, pictured above) eventually goes along with the idea, with disastrous results. The play ends with him successfully back in the AA fold – indeed, it starts with this too, since the story is told in flashback, with Paul looking back at what he sees as a very stupid episode in his life.

Now where is the wickedness in that?