I hate missing lunch. But recently, through mild illness, I missed a bit of a corker. Four West End producers invited the daily and Sunday critics to a do at The Ivy. What was meant as a convivial social occasion apparently turned confrontational. The assembled producers accused the critics of double-standards: of judging new West End plays more harshly than subsidised work. That night my colleagues were positively buzzing with indignation at the unfairness of the charge.

But might it have a smidgin of truth? I don’t honestly think any of us sets out in the evening donning the poisoned boot simply because it’s a West End show. Critics, by and large, are stage-struck figures who manage to preserve an innocent faith in theatre even into mature years. And, if you know what you think in advance, why bother to turn up? The most I will admit is that, if I sense a stinkeroo coming up, I sometimes exercise the privilege of not reviewing it.

What critics less readily admit is that judgement is often affected by context. Let’s talk turkey. In 1998 I saw Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. Watching an Irish play, steeped in magic and folklore, before an Irish audience, I was captivated by its weird charm. Olwen Fouere, one of the great unsung actresses, also gave a startling performance as the demonic heroine. But when the same play was done at Wyndham’s in the West End a few years later, with Holly Hunter as the swan-lugging Hester, I was distinctly under-whelmed. The play seemed to have been severed from its roots and Hunter’s accent owed less to the Irish boglands than to Skid Row. Same text. Same play. But a totally different aesthetic experience.

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We critics talk endlessly about issues. Can Kevin Spacey turn the Old Vic around? Whither the National Theatre? Are there too many Hollywood stars in the West End? But we rarely talk about acting. Partly through pressure of space and time. But also because our theatre is no longer dominated, as it was in the 1940s and 50s, by heroic performers. The age of Olivier, Gielgud and Ashcroft is past. Now we talk of going to see “Trevor Nunn’s Hamlet” or “Sam Mendes’s Othello.”

So, for a change, I’d like to celebrate an actor: David Haig who, in the current revival of Michael Frayn’s Donkeys’ Years, is giving what I see as a career-defining performance. Haig has, of course, been around for some time always doing fine work. He was a vital part of the Royal Court under Max Stafford-Clark. He was the knee-trembling centrepiece of Terry Johnson’s Dead Funny. And for me he was much the best thing about Mary Poppins. As the employer of the starch-knickered nanny, there was an extraordinary moment when he returned home after losing his job and barked loudly at his brattish offspring. It was as if real life had suddenly intruded into the technicolour fantasy of the musical.

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“In olden times a glimpse of stocking was faintly shocking, now anything goes.” Well, Cole Porter’s famous line certainly applies to the modern stage. There is virtually no word that can’t be said, no act of sex or violence that can’t be shown, no bodily function that can’t be simulated. But, after a recent spate of physically explicit theatre, I begin to wonder if discretion isn’t sometimes the better part of show-business as well as valour.

Even to raise the question is to be accused of censorship. That, of course, is nonsense. I remember all too clearly the stifling restrictions of the pre-1968 era when all plays had to be submitted to the Lord Chamberlain. What was particularly absurd was the hypocrisy it produced. There was something quite dotty about the idea that because you’d paid a token sum to join a notional club – which was the standard tactic to evade censorship – you were somehow morally equipped to watch Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or John Osborne’s A Patriot for Me. Good riddance to all that. What I’m talking about is the virtue of restraint.

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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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Is the straight play dying out? Are we seeing the demise of the solo author? I normally avoid such cosmic questions. They remind me of those absurd pieces on “the death of fiction” invariably accompanied by reviews of another bulging batch of new novels. But a recent week on the critical beat led me to wonder if the theatrical ground wasn’t beginning to shift under my feet. Let me explain.

One night I went to see Amato Saltone at Shunt Vaults. This was a weird experience in which the audience was led on a journey through the cellars beneath London Bridge station and confronted by unsettling Hitchcockian images; because we were split into groups, we all had different stories to tell. Next night it was off to Hammersmith for Kneehigh’s Nights at the Circus, a gaudily enjoyable re-creation of Angela Carter’s novel about an angelic aerialiste. Although Tom Morris and Emma Rice are credited with the adaptation, this is basically a company-devised show.

What came next? Robert Lepage’s The Andersen Project, which proved to be a visually sophisticated trip into the Montreal wizard’s pysche. After that, I was at the Old Vic for The Soldier’s Tale, a laborious Anglo-Iraqi show in which Stravinsky’s Faustian fable was rendered in both English and Arabic. I also nipped down to The Pit to catch Metamorphoses and Electra, two pieces exuberantly performed by an experimental troupe from Poland’s Gardzienice who have had a big influence on British directors like Katie Mitchell and Emma Rice.

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Mention American theatre and everyone thinks of Broadway: the razzle-dazzle of the Great White Way. British critics, in particular, seem to think that a few blocks in mid-town Manhattan contain the nation’s creative heart. But I’ve got news for them, and everyone else: there is a world elsewhere. The more I’ve visited America, the more I’ve become convinced there is a vibrant, continent-wide, non-profit theatre that expresses the national mood.

The dream of a network of regional theatres is an old one. I’ve just been dipping into Volume Two of the Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, to be published shortly by Oberon Books. In 1945 you find Williams writing to a New York critic of his vision of a chain of subsidised theatres that would offer artists “attention in place of neglect, fellowship in place of embittering loneliness and isolation”. Williams goes on to say that “if there were such theatres as commonly as there are state universities and civic orchestras, think what a happy difference it would make for all of us and what we might be inspired to do and be!”

To some extent, Williams’ hopes have been realised. Even if federal subsidy is still pathetically small, most major cities now contain their own non-profit playhouse. Three years ago, I visited the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis for the premiere of Arthur Miller’s Resurrection Blues.

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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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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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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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In the next few weeks stacks of shows will make their way from the Edinburgh Fringe to London. Over-praised in the North, some will get cut down to size in the South. Others, often very good, will be critically ignored. So I have a radical suggestion to make. Why don’t more companies cut out the middleman, forsake expensive, inflated Edinburgh and open in London in August where, believe it or not, there is an audience hungry for theatre?

To me, the Edinburgh Fringe has become a bad joke (and there is no lack of those given the plethora of attention-seeking stand-ups). What started in 1947 as an alternative idea has turned into a capitalist institution – one dominated by a handful of big commercial venues outside which the weakest often go to the wall. And the search for quality becomes a needle-in-haystack job. Of the 1,600 shows on view at the Fringe this year, I would estimate the vast majority are rubbish and will leave their performers sadly out of pocket. Yet each year gullible innocents are lured to Edinburgh by the prospect of fame and fortune: it is the ultimate triumph of hype over experience.

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