Do you want to start an argument? Just mention George Bernard Shaw. Nearly 30 years ago, I suggested in the Guardian that we should have a Shaw Festival in Britain like the one in Niagara-on-the-Lake. The result was a correspondence that raged for several weeks. And only the other day I commented on our theatre’s current staggering indifference to Shaw. Again the letters and emails flooded in. Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?

What is sadly true is that most theatrical producers – with the honourable exceptions of Peter Hall, Sam Walters and Dominic Dromgoole – would rather commit hara-kiri than put on a play by Bernard Shaw. They consider him dated, sexless, talky: the laureate of logorrhoea. Their case was best put by Peter Nichols’ over-acting captain, Terri Dennis, in Privates on Parade: “Oh that Bernadette Shaw! What a chatterbox! Nags away from asshole to breakfast-time but never sees what’s staring her in the face.”

It wasn’t always thus. I was lucky enough to be an undergraduate when Frank Hauser mounted some stunning Shaw revivals at Oxford Playhouse. (It was Hauser who, when asked by some smart-ass student whether Shaw was coming back, crisply replied “I didn’t know he’d been away”.) The late Peter Bridge also staged a whole series of star-packed Shaw revivals in the West End of the Sixties and Seventies. And Bernard Miles at the Mermaid treated us to a host of minor Shaws including Fanny’s First Play, Village Wooing and O’Flaherty VC in which Ian McKellen dazzled as an Irish soldier who’d unforgivably fought with the English on the Western front.

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