The ever-youthful Nigel Havers is appearing before audiences in a triple guise at the moment on the stage of the Harold Pinter Theatre in London. As old as me but for a few weeks, he still looks young enough (as I certainly would not!) to take on the role of the waggish Algernon Moncrieff in a new production of The Importance of Being Earnest that has had some critics spitting tacks.

Simultaneously, he is giving us a portrait of a womanising amateur thespian called Dicky, a leading light in the Bunbury Company of Players, who are shown in this production to be reviving Oscar Wilde’s evergreen comedy. It is this framing device applied by director Lucy Bailey, an alumnus of St Peter’s College, Oxford, that has attracted most of the critical ire. “Those who love Wilde will feel let down by the self-indulgent travesty of a masterpiece,” spluttered the Daily Telegraph’s Charles Spencer.

And thirdly, so familiar a face does Havers present to audiences that he cannot avoid appearing as himself. I saw him before the show buying a bottle of water at a shop around the corner from the stage door. Momentarily tricked into thinking I knew him, I only just managed to avoid saying hello.

That one never quite forgets who he is in real life has an interesting consequence in this production where some of the dialogue is concerned. Readers possibly recall the scene when Jack Worthing (here played by Martin Jarvis) calls Lady Bracknell a “Gorgon” in a remark addressed to Moncrieff. Then he remembers himself. “I beg your pardon, Algy, I suppose I shouldn’t talk about your own aunt in that way before you.”

Algernon replies: “My dear boy, I love hearing my relations abused. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all. Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven’t got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die.”

Now I heard this exchange in the very week that Havers had been in the news in a matter concerning his own aunt. In his case, though, he had been springing to her defence very gallantly rather than rejoicing at hearing her abused.

The woman in question is Lady Butler-Sloss, who had been judged by some to be unsuitable to chair the panel of inquiry into child abuse because her brother (Havers’s father) Sir Nigel Havers had backed a decision not to prosecute Sir Peter Hayman, a senior diplomat and a subscriber to the Paedophile Information Exchange, during his period as Attorney General.

Havers told The World at One on BBC Radio 4: “I know my aunt very well. Had she felt any form of bias, or any idea that she shouldn’t be doing this inquiry she would have pulled out this morning. The very fact she hasn’t means to me she feels she has absolutely had no political ties to my father and knew nothing about what was going on in the House of Commons at that time. Therefore she has every right to lead the inquiry.

“I know her well enough to know she is totally honest, totally transparent, highly respected and very very good at her job. I don’t think the fact that my father was Attorney General at the time makes any difference whatsoever.”

His intervention, however, was unable to silence his aunt’s critics. Within five days, she handed in her resignation, saying “It has become clear to me that I did not sufficiently consider whether my background and the fact my brother had been Attorney General would cause difficulties.”