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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