food stains on my clothese seem to be my main risk when eating and talking at the same time!

Courage = alcohol is also metonymy, I suspect. Metaphor as defined in such contexts is seen to be ‘similar or opposite to’ as part of a semantic set. But there are times when either analysis is possible – fish and chips can be associated either as a ‘just so’ British cultural choice or as opposites (land v. sea and vegetable v. animal). Or they can just be eaten and enjoyed without too much thought!

‘The bottle’ means ‘booze’. (That’s metonymy, that is.) ‘Courage’ as in ‘Dutch courage’ also means alcohol. (Is that a metaphor?) ‘Bottle’ (without ‘the’) also means ‘courage’. So we have quite a nice surface.

‘Courageous’ is a simple definition of SPIRITED. By way of the (usually American) process of verbing nouns ‘spirited’ can be taken to mean alcoholic, and booze is undoubtedly so.

But it doesn’t quite work. The ? is disconnected from the cryptic definition. The usual meaning of spirit is distinct from wine, beer etc. And the metaphor is very sepecific to use with ‘Dutch’. Maybe some reconstruction and the introduction of ‘gin’ would help but surely the surface would be poorer.

Now I need a metaphorical nightcap.

Chambers “allows” synonyms to have the same “(usu very nearly the same)” meaning. Also in Chambers I can go from ‘fake’ to ‘conterfeit’ to ‘imitation’ to ‘copy’. So are ‘fake’ and ‘copy’ very nearly the same? Well, they’re a lot nearer than some of the definitions the setters expect us to allow.

Re FOOTLIGHTS: I wasn’t entirely comfortable with this clue: I thought it was just a fairly weak charade and I expressed my reservations about the second part of it. I provided the link to justify the ‘theatre’.
But I did like the connection with the theme!

From somewhere in the ether I fathomed THE HISTORY BOYS leading to BENNETT and A PRIVATE FUNCTION.

Forced to Google the works I don’t know and then almost a write in. Only held up by EGGHEAD

Sorry Paul but Dull.

One quibble that I had is with FOOTLIGHTS – they might be called a theatre group, I suppose, but the theatre is the ADC, not Footlights.

Thanks for that. You are quite right, of course.