Even the flies on the wall must have been reduced to helpless giggles when four octogenarians got together for lunch in a pretty cottage in Sussex. Four acting dames no less: Dames Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Eileen Atkins and Joan Plowright. Illustrious members of the last acting generation to be called “actresses” (in fact one wouldn’t dare call them anything else), they had first met in the late 1950s and now gathered to knock back the champagne at Joan Plowright’s house, the one she and her husband Lord Olivier bought when he was director of the Chichester Theatre.