They met in 1978 and, boy, did they click.In the late Twenties, Brooks had found herself in decadent Berlin, starring in G W Pabst’s immortal silent movie, Pandora’s Box, as the mythic and iconic Lulu, that “creature of impulse, [an] unpretentious temptress capable of dissolving into a fit of giggles at a romantic climax, amoral but selfless, Lesbian and hetero, with that sleek black cloche of hair that rings so many bells in my memory; the only star I can imagine either being enslaved to or wanting to enslave.” The words are, of course, Tynan’s.Male critics, in these attenuated times, don’t often clamber into frocks. Honoured and rare would be the party nowadays that welcomed Michael Billington done up to the nines as Gloria Swanson or Michael Coveney parading himself as Bette Davis Still, we live in hope. Stalking round the fancy-dress ball as Brooks, Tynan claimed to have come as Baden-Powell Oh, what real fun drama criticism must once have been. In Smoking With Lulu, the focus is on the three-day encounter in 1978 between the doyen of theatre journalists and the silent-screen siren who had long ago turned her back on movies and gone into a 50-year period as a recluse, occasionally firing off clear-eyed articles for specialist movie magazines.In Munsil’s native Canada, where the play was first seen, its title was Emphysema, after the lung condition that dogged both of these career-smokers.

It’s a sad irony that Tynan, surely the greatest organism for reacting to live performance that evolution has yet produced, wound up in his final years (after the glory days of The Observer and his influential period as Literary Manager of the National) in the theatrical desert of California, watching (of all things) afternoon television. It was while flicking through a TV guide one Sunday that he noticed Pandora’s Box was about to air. Seeing this again sparked off a desire to write a New Yorker profile about Brooks. Hence his visit to her hideaway in Rochester NY, where she lived, now a thin arthritis-ridden septuagenarian, partly funded by payments from a former lover, William Paley, the founder of CBS.The British premiÿre, which opens at the West Yorkshire Playhouse tonight, stars Peter Eyre as Tynan and Thelma Barlow as the 70-odd-year-old Brooks. I met up with them for lunch in Leeds to talk about the two late luminaries they are depicting They are very good casting.

Peter Eyre not only has a distinct look of Tynan, the effete dandy, but also knew him as a friend – though the high-born Eyre is very much to the manner born, whereas Tynan was to the manner made, his own dazzling fabrication. The sublime Thelma Barlow, whose Mavis Riley on 25 years of Coronation Street is one of the greatest comic creations of the television era, is actually not at all like Mavis in “real life”. Her Corrie character never got calmer than flustered agony on the stress scale, whereas Ms Barlow radiates a wry wisdom and humorous realism. And besides, she knows what it is like to be icon.In the play, Brooks is narked that Tynan seems to be more interested in her as the fictional Lulu (a third figure in the piece who has some fantasy sequences with the critic). Given that I can hardly restrain myself from grabbing a flower from the vase, clamping it between my teeth and hurling myself at Barlow’s feet, I’m aware that this actress, too, must get cheesed off with people who treat her as though she were Mavis. But my devotion to Mavis is turning by the minute into an infatuation with Thelma, who laughs off the idea that her fans are as pervy as Brooks’s were – “although,” she adds with a tantalising smile, “some of them take the whole thing very seriously indeed”.It’s a pretty odd business for a critic to break bread with a couple of actors in order to talk about another critic – particularly as any reviewer gossiping about Tynan feels like a small-time gigolo indulging in tittle-tattle about Casanova.Eyre pours out interesting first-hand perceptions of Tynan, such as that he (Tynan) always had to have a theory about everything, including sex. This leads me to liken him to D H Lawrence and to ask whether the great theatre critic, deviser of Oh! Calcutta! and keen aficionado of spanking, was another sex-in-the-head merchant.