Marlowe, Sheridan, Pinter? ... Ian McKellen in King Lear at the Courtyard Theatre. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
I promise not to keep coming up with league table blogs. But last week I found myself at the centre of a heated debate. The subject: who, restricting oneself to Anglo-Irish writers, is the next best dramatist after Shakespeare? What prompted the argument was the Guardian's reprinting of an intemperate letter from John Osborne disputing my claim that Shaw was Shakespeare's natural heir.
I remember vividly what started the ball rolling. Thirty years ago I was sitting in a Toronto hotel room writing a piece about the Shaw festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake. I remarked, parenthetically, that it was high time we had our own Shaw festival since he was our second-best dramatist. Suddenly all hell was let loose. And, in reprinting Osborne's anti-Shavian diatribe, the paper re-opened the issue. At a party last week I was attacked by an actor and a publisher, both of whom put the boot into Shaw.
What is astonishing is the rage Shaw provokes. He used to be a staple of the reps and the West End: now the National's revival of Saint Joan is a rare event. Yet, however unfashionable he may be, Shaw was a pioneering figure who anticipated many of the key movements of 20th-century drama. Saint Joan itself, with its dispassionate analysis of the heroine, is a forerunner of Brecht's Galileo. Too True To Be Good has all the ingredients of Absurdist drama. Heartbreak House could be said to inaugurate the state-of-the-nation play. Time, I suspect, will be kinder to Shaw than current trends suggest.
But what of other contenders to the title of runner-up to Shakespeare? Obviously the man's own contemporaries enter the list. Jonson's The Alchemist is a matchless mix of farce and social satire. Webster's The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil are packed with an aphoristic, death-haunted poetry that rivals anything in Shakespeare. Marlowe's Edward II is also more than a match for Richard II in its portrayal of a monarch whose downfall is determined by a character flaw.
You could also make a case for a host of Restoration dramatists and 18th-century wits: Congreve, Farquhar, Wycherley, Sheridan and Goldsmith. The majority were of Irish origin and the list continues with Wilde, Yeats, O'Casey and, of course, Shaw himself. But the point made by the actor and publisher was that you don't have to look to the past to find the next-best dramatist to Shakespeare. One of them passionately championed Beckett. A fair point. But, although Godot and Endgame are unquestionable masterpieces, I find too many of Beckett's other plays lack the interpretative freedom of natural classics. In the end, how many ways are there of staging Happy Days or Not I?
Maybe, in fact, we should look to the living to find a successor to Shakespeare. David Edgar has often argued that our contemporaries write plays that rival the best of the past. Some would claim that Stoppard's intellectual fantasias are as good as anything from the last 400 years. Others would put the case for Caryl Churchill as a dramatist who endlessly re-invents dramatic form. And, partial as I may be, I'd say Harold Pinter has produced a body of work that articulates universal insecurities and fears. In fact, Pinter now gets my vote in place of Shaw. In the end, it's all a guessing-game. But also a highly productive one in that, in deciding who ranks next to Shakespeare, one is forced to re-examine the nature of drama and the definition of a classic.
