TABOOS: When Harriet Met Sally, the latest play from Carl Djerassi (who also invented the contraceptive pill) opens later this month at the New End Theatre in Hampstead. But before even a single ticket had gone on sale it received an unexpected premiere — on a hospital ward.

Djerassi, 82, the chemist who led the American team that synthesised the first oral contraceptive in 1951, was convalescing in North London at the St John & St Elizabeth hospital after breaking his shoulder at Christmas.

But he was impatient to rehearse his tale of religious disquiet and lesbian artificial insemination, and so the director and six-strong cast assembled at his bedside to run through the material, which included some very un-PC lines about sperm banks, odd sexual techniques and the inevitable turkey baster.

“It was a first for me and the director, and I’m pretty sure it was a first for the hospital,” said Djerassi, whose plays have been translated into ten languages Apparently the work went down a storm. “The theatre I am used to is an operating theatre,” said one orderly. “This was much more fun.”

Panic in the shires, where the Tory faithful are preparing for tomorrow night’s Winter Ball. This year it has been rebranded the Black and White Ball, but the new dress code is causing confusion. Black tie, white tie or no tie — and some cheeky modernisers are even threatening white Travolta-style suits. Whatever next? Women in trousers?

Ps

Justin Timberlake’s turn as a drug dealer in the film Alpha Dog required him to cover his body with false tattoos. One of them, a Chinese ideogram, has caused bafflement among polyglot audiences. It translates as “ice skating”.

John Banville, the Booker Prize-winning novelist, is writing a crime thriller under a pseudonym. “I’d written a TV script and decided to turn it into a potboiler to make some money,” he says. “I wanted to be called Benjamin White. But my publishers told me to change it to Benjamin Black to top the alphabetical listings.”

people@thetimes.co.uk

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