ARTS / Right of reply: Michael Attenborough of the RSC says that David Lister's 'obituary' for political theatre is premature

JOURNALISTS regularly feel the need to compose obituaries for political theatre - a wearisome tradition honoured in David Lister's 'PC or not PC' (14 September). I suspect Lister was reared, as I was, on the state-of-nation plays of the Seventies and early Eighties - political in the sense of David Hare's recent trilogy at the National Theatre. You could argue that Hare's plays are the exceptions that prove the rule, but I'm not sure how writers such as Howard Brenton, David Edgar, Peter Flannery and Doug Lucie would feel about such a generalisation. And I am even now in rehearsal for Pentecost, a new play by David Edgar - a clear example of a contemporary writer confronting, on a broad canvas, burning political and cultural issues facing Europe in the post-Communist Nineties.

I think David Lister is toying with a misleading half-truth and would tend to agree with Stephen Daldry when he says that politics and the political play are being redefined. Issues on the cusp of the personal and the political - sexuality, gender, violence, race - are now demanding more immediate attention than the crude battle between right and left. Correspondingly, form and setting have shifted, too.

The work-place play, so evident in the Seventies, is now a rarity; it was a genre in which the relationship between shopfloor and management could readily be explored. But I'm unconvinced that those writers set out to be 'political', as such, any more than Brad Fraser aspires to be 'non-political'. Most playwrights, in their various different ways, confront the challenge of relating personal experience to a broader context, the private to the public. You can see that in many of the new plays the RSC has done in the last few years - Peter Whelan's A Bright and Bold Design, Richard Nelson's Misha's Party, and most recently Anne Devlin's After Easter, which relates an Irish woman's quest for her own identity to the cultural and political context into which she was born.

As for David Lister's claim that the Troubles in Northern Ireland have produced no classic drama - classic is a loaded word. It takes a while for a work to acquire classic status. And how does one pinpoint what the Troubles have directly produced? I suspect that in years to come plays by writers such as Devlin, Frank McGuinness, Ron Hutchinson, Brian Friel and Stewart Parker will firmly refute such a claim.

Michael Attenborough is Executive Producer of the Royal Shakespeare Company. He was talking to Georgina Brown. 'Pentecost' previews at the RSC's The Other Place from 12 October