The Best of Friends is an epistolary play by Hugh Whitemore about the friendship of George Bernard Shaw, Sydney Cockerell and Dame Laurentia McLachlan, based in the lengthy correspondence that passed between them for over 25 years. It was inspired by The Nun, the Infidel, and the Superman, a book by Dame Felicitas Corrigan, a Benedictine nun at Stanbrook Abbey in the U.K. Originally produced as a stage play it first ran at the Apollo Theatre in 1988, with Ray McAnally as Shaw, Sir John Gielgud as Cockerell, and Rosemary Harris as McLachlan.