CS: Well no, but actually there have been two revivals of Simon’s plays fairly recently, Quartermaine’s Terms and The Common Pursuit, both of which stand up really well. But particularly The Common Pursuit, which is almost a vanished world now, of people who think that literature is important and who are happy to spend their lives doing little arts magazines, and who are also ferociously clever, by and large. And it’s a terrible thing to say, but that sort of writing of educated middle-class people refl ecting their own lives and interests has gone out of fashion to a large extent.

SG: It was never really in fashion. Not with the intellectual Left, for example. As soon as these plays began to arrive they were yearning for working-class [productions], they would actually use that sort of phrase. And so I don’t think they’ve ever actually been very popular on either flank.

CS: But they’ve been commercial successes often. Which you couldn’t say of the leftwing plays. The hard Left plays that are much admired by some. Brenton, for instance, has never really had a hit with his hard-Left stuff, has he?