I’ve been thinking a lot lately about illness. Not because it’s the season of snuffles and flu but because of an extraordinary combination of circumstances. On one November day, I found myself going to my National Health physio for treatment of critics’ knee, talking to Sir John Mortimer about young dramatists’ morbid preoccupation with sickness and attending the hilarious Almeida production of Molière’s The Hypochondriac. At the end of a long day, it hit me that we now revere illness. What we have lost is Molière’s capacity for cleansing laughter at the expense of ourselves and the medical profession.

Sickness, you may say, is no joking matter, especially when it affects us or our loved ones. But my conversation with John Mortimer occurred in the context of having just read 17 new plays for the Pearson Playwrights’ Scheme. This, I should explain, is a brilliant scheme that offers bursaries of £6,500 to promising young writers; over the past 30 years, there’s hardly a playwright of note who hasn’t benefited from it. But Sir John, who chairs the panel that makes the awards, was talking about the prevailing gloom of this year’s entries.

“Everyone,” he said, “seems to be writing about their private physical or psychological ailments. One longs for writers to get out of their rooms and engage with the world at large.” Although there are some fine plays within the batch, I couldn’t help but agree.

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