The question came out of the blue. “Why,” I was suddenly asked by the editor of the Observer on the first night of The Entertainer at the Old Vic, “are there so many old plays around?” He cited not just the fantastic John Osborne play but Peter Shaffer’s Equus and Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie. Off the top of my head, I said it’s because they all offer juicy star parts in a way few modern plays do. While last month in this column I urged that we pay more attention to supporting actors, there’s no denying that audiences love seeing charismatic performers in star parts.

And not just audiences. Actors too feel they have to measure themselves against the top roles in the canon. GH Lewes, a celebrated Victorian critic, said that “he is greatest who is greatest in the highest reaches of his art”. And just as every actor who aspires to acclaim has, at some stage, to play Hamlet or Lear, so every actress has to essay Hedda Gabler or Cleopatra. But these are classics. The intriguing question is why there are so few comparable star parts in modern drama.

The obvious answer is that we live in an anti-heroic age. We are suspicious of the cult of individualism. We nominally espouse egalitarianism. We believe our lives are controlled by economic forces rather than exceptional leaders. While that may be true, it didn’t stop Bertolt Brecht, a Marxist debunker of heroism, creating a stream of lead roles. If a handful of Brecht’s plays are constantly revived, it is because Galileo, Mother Courage, Arturo Ui and the peasant Grusha in The Caucasian Chalk Circle are a test for any performer.

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We live in a star-gazing society. We worship celebrity. We zealously seek the opinions of the famous. And virtually the only way for a straight play to succeed in the West End is for it to come encrusted with big names. But while I accept this as a reality, I should like to put in a plea for supporting players: for the actors who get relegated to the foot of the reviews, if they are mentioned at all, and yet who are often the key to a production’s success.
 
“There are no small parts, there are only small actors.” That was one of the aphorisms coined by Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko when they were setting up the Moscow Art Theatre. What they meant was clear: that every role demands attention and that plays should be conceived and cast democratically rather than hierarchically. They were fortunate in having Anton Chekhov as their virtual house-dramatist. In his plays - as in his short stories – every single character fulfils a vital function.

It was Ian Rickson’s Royal Court production of The Seagull that recently highlighted for me the strength and depth of British acting. Kristin Scott Thomas, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Mackenzie Crook dominated the reviews. Yet I’d argue that it was the rich-textured work of the supporting cast that made the production work. You saw this in the opening moments when Katherine Parkinson’s Masha scooped up Konstantin’s discarded notes as if they were holy relics. So besotted was she that Pearce Quigley as Medvedenko was even interrupted in his delivery of the famous first line, “Why do you always wear black?” Here was superb acting from two relatively young players.

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Who wants to follow a star? Once it was considered madness to take over a leading role on which an Olivier or Ashcroft had left their unique imprint. Now, however, we have seen an astonishing cultural shift. The West End is positively bulging with shows that prove there is no longer a stigma to going in second or third. Think of Stephen Moore  in The History Boys.

Or Simon Russell Beale in Spamalot. Or Emma Fielding and David Calder in Rock ‘N’ Roll. Felicity Kendal has even had the courage to reprise a role associated with Judi Dench in Amy’s View. This is not merely a major turnaround. I think there is sometimes a positive advantage to assuming a role that another actor has created.

My own fascination with takeovers goes back to my youth. As a student, I came tripping down from Oxford to see My Fair Lady at Drury Lane. Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews had long gone to be replaced by Alec Clunes and Anne Rogers. But any sense of second-best was instantly dispelled by the magisterial, silver-haired Clunes. He possessed one of the most mellifluous voices on the English stage; and the moment when he bid Eliza remember that “your native language is the language of Shakespeare, Milton and the Bible” stays with me still. Of course, I saw Harrison in the movie; but, for all his irascibility, he was no match for Clunes in terms of vocal beauty or cardiganed elegance.

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Is audience behaviour getting worse? Or is it just that new technology is becoming more obtrusive? Before anyone accuses me of being a Grumpy Old Man, I should say that I can scarcely remember a time when London offered such a wide range of high-quality shows: Rock ‘n’ Roll, The Seafarer, The Alchemist, A Moon for the Misbegotten, Waiting for Godot and Cabaret are all, in different ways, superb. At the same time, audiences seem to be getting less considerate.

We’ve all heard the stories of Richard Griffiths interrupting performances of The History Boys in London and New York because of ringing mobile phones. Some old pros argue that Griffiths should have ploughed on. I’m with Griffiths. When he stopped the show on Broadway, he told a family of four, each of whose mobiles had gone off in the space of five minutes: “You’ve shown the most incredible disrespect to a thousand people in this room.” I gather he was wildly applauded.

I had my own Richard Griffiths moment in the West End during the first night of Cabaret at the Lyric Theatre where my attention was distracted for the whole of the first half by the luminous glare of a Blackberry being frantically used by a gent about six seats in. Others were as angry as myself and, in the interval, I beetled off in search of the house manager to register a complaint - something on which she promised to act.

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David Hare is not only one of our best dramatists. He is also an acute analyst of theatre. In a talk called “Why Fabulate?”- published in a recent collection of lectures - he raises fascinating questions about storytelling. Hare claims we are surrounded in all media by stale fictions and bankrupt formulae. The job of the artist, he concludes, is to restore our sense of wonder in the infinite variety of life.

How does Hare’s argument apply to theatre? Though less prone to deadly repetition than film and television, it too relies on exhausted forms. In the 1950s it was the West End drawing-room comedy which declined into snobbish platitude. And today? Well, you can take your pick. For me, the black box study of urban angst, the scissors-and-paste literary adaptation and the rock anthology which simply raids the back-catalogue are all prime examples of tired genres. Critics are often told that their duty is to judge whether a show is good of its kind. But sometimes you also have to ask if a particular category hasn’t been flogged to death.

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The autumn brochures are tumbling in. And already there is bags to look forward to. O’Neill at the Old Vic with Eve Best and Kevin Spacey. Ben Jonson and Tony Kushner at the National. Mamet and Ibsen at the Donmar. New plays by Terry Johnson and Caryl Churchill at the Royal Court. Spamalot and Cabaret in the West End. Outside London there’s also plenty to whet the appetite. Hare and Brenton’s Pravda in Chichester. Kneehigh and Cardboard Citizens doing Shakespeare in Stratford. Webster in Leeds and Pinter in Sheffield, Nottingham and Bristol.

One name, however, is almost entirely missing from the autumn lists: George Bernard Shaw. Almost alone in the British theatre, Sam Walters at the Orange Tree in Richmond is marking the 150th anniversary of Shaw’s birth by staging Major Barbara and a season of two triple-bills. Elsewhere, however, there is silence, as if Shaw had never been. Even if I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: the British theatre seems to me insane in ignoring one of the few geniuses it ever harboured in its midst.

We all know the arguments against Shaw. That his characters are mouthpieces for his ideas. That he is thunderingly didactic. That he is all intellect and no emotion. But these stock responses fall by the wayside when you actually encounter the plays. One recent Sunday I happened to catch an excellent Mrs Warren’s Profession on Radio Three. The final scene, in which the brothel-managing Mrs Warren pleads for her daughter’s love, is as heart-stopping as anything you could wish. And, even if there is something cold-hearted about Vivie’s rejection of her mother, Shaw - who was writing out of bitter personal experience - makes you aware of the sense of loss.

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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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