I normally avoid press conferences. They disrupt a critic’s day and are a clunky way of providing information that easily could be sent by email or letter. But I made an exception for the Royal Court’s announcement of its 50th birthday plans. Not just because of the prospect of bacon butties at 9.30am in Sloane Square but because the Royal Court occupies a peculiar place in my affections and remains for me the most vital theatre in London.

It’s partly a generational thing. I readily confess I was not present at the famous first night of Look Back in Anger on 8 May 1956 – I was doing my school homework at the time. But I became fanatically obsessed with John Osborne and the ‘Angry Young Man’ phenomenon. So much so that I made a Saturday night pilgrimage from the Midlands to Sloane Square in 1957 to see Look Back; I remember standing on the theatre steps gazing at the faces of people emerging from the five o’clock matinee to see if they had been transformed by the experience!

Naïve perhaps. But it’s a measure of the hold the Royal Court had on my young imagination. When I came to London in 1964, I even got a job reading scripts for the Court for two pounds a time. One day, however, I was summoned by Tom Osborn, the literary manager, and told that George Devine thought my reports read too much like theatre reviews.

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