Why don’t we properly celebrate our dramatists? We give them gongs, statuettes and lifetime achievement awards. We endlessly profile them in newspapers. Sometimes, after they’re dead, we even put blue plaques up outside their houses. But the one thing we don’t do – at least not while they’re alive – is honour them with seasons of their work and serious discussion.

These thoughts were prompted last month by an extraordinary four days in Turin where Harold Pinter received the European Theatre Prize. Roger Planchon directed six of Pinter’s late political plays. Michael Gambon, Jeremy Irons, Charles Dance and Penelope Wilton performed a brilliant anthology of Pinter’s poetry, prose and drama. A two-day conference included papers from British critics – John Peter, Benedict Nightingale and Alastair Macaulay – as well as academics from America, France, Germany, Italy, Chile and Brazil. I even conducted a public interview with Pinter in the beautiful, baroque Carignano Theatre that was heralded by a moving, four-minute standing ovation. As fellow London-based critic Carole Woddis asked me later, “Why couldn’t this happen in Britain?”

To be honest, I’m not sure of the answer. It may be that dramatists, like prophets, are only honoured outside their own country. It may also be that our theatres, committed to a rapid turnover, have neither the time nor inclination to celebrate a living dramatist. That responsibility falls elsewhere. Mark Batty, a lively young academic from Leeds, is in fact planning a big Pinterfest at the university for April 2007. Michael Colgan, the exuberant director of Dublin’s Gate Theatre, has also staged two Pinter seasons modelled on his exemplary Beckett retrospectives. But very few British theatres ever celebrate an individual dramatist: that’s an honour we reserve for Shakespeare (as clearly evidenced by the RSC’s year-long Complete Works, which launches this month).

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