Playwright and professional poéte maudit, Barry Dickins launched this collection as part of La Mama’s thirtieth anniversary festivities. Dickins, it is reported, was not in a festive mood. In an unusually begrudging and self-absorbed frame of mind, he allegedly failed to extol the selected plays and went so far as to hint that one of his own tautly sprung specimens should have been included.

With most of my plays (even Dimboola) going out of print, it is tempting, but only for a split second, to echo the Noel Coward of Reservoir. I would have been ineligible: The La Mama Collection (‘six plays for the 1990s’) is most rigorously centred on the new and young. As such it is a model of the neophilia which drives and dominates our theatre culture, a neophilia emanating from indigenous theatre companies but also whipped up and cemented by an inanely modish media.