This gala matinée felt rather as if the audience had been invited to lunch with Richard Briers, his wife Annie, and fellow actor Peter Egan — although, to be strictly accurate, lunch was actually consumed beforehand.

The atmosphere was of Briers sitting at the head of the dining table — slightly frail-looking now, and his voice needing more amplification than it received here, but with his mischievous grin and abundant sense of humour very much intact, ready to entertain his guests.

There was a family feeling too. Briars and Egan have been friends for 30 years, having first met when they worked together in a West End production of Arms and the Man. Even the warm-up artist, Simon Slater, is the partner of Peter Egan’s actress daughter Rebecca. Slater provided some polished and suitably humorous cabaret numbers as an overture to the show, and an extended conjuring trick involving the supposed burning of a £20 note before the second half: Tommy Cooper he is not, but it was entertaining nonetheless — also, he joked, it gave Richard Briers the chance to down another half of stout backstage.

Briers and Egan most famously worked together in the BBC TV sitcom Ever Decreasing Circles, and the chemistry between them is still strong, as they demonstrated here in a scene played out between Jeeves and Wooster: Wooster (Briers): “Have those mauve shirts I ordered arrived yet?” Jeeves (Egan, after a perfectly timed pause): “Yes Sir, but I’ve sent them back. They would not have become you.” Other readings followed, including a hilarious rendition of Mr Toad’s disastrous purchase of a motor car.

Homage was paid, too, to Briers’s second cousin Terry-Thomas, his exaggerated upper crust accent being exactly captured. The second half was devoted to theatrical reminiscences: I only wish I had the space to tell you about the flatulent murderer, the six-foot sword and the real blood in Richard III . . .