Double standards

The director Lindsay Anderson used to say that the Royal Court at its best does new plays as if they were classics and classics as if they were new plays. Max Stafford-Clark – who ran this national theatre of new writing from 1979 to 1993 – hit on a further way of helping to break down the barriers between the established and the hot-off-the-press. He had the idea of taking a classic text, inviting a contemporary dramatist to respond to it, and then running the two pieces in rep in a thought-provoking dialectic. It's a policy he has continued to pursue with Out of Joint, the consistently admirable touring company he formed when he left the Court.

The process began in 1988 with his revival of The Recruiting Officer, Farquhar's sharp 1706 comedy of tricky military/civilian relations. It was presented in tandem with Our Country's Good, Timberlake Wertenbaker's acclaimed adaptation of a Thomas Keneally novel about convicts in an Australian penal colony who (as a matter of historical fact) were allowed to put on Farquhar's play to mark the King's birthday. Now, several such projects later, Out of Joint, in a co-production with the National Theatre, is touring another dramatic diptych – the much-loved Oliver Goldsmith comedy of class and courtship, She Stoops to Conquer (1773), and A Laughing Matter, a shrewd and witty new play by April De Angelis about the extraordinary difficulties that Goldsmith faced in getting this contentious work staged.

"Why can't we do a play about now?" asks a character in Our Country's Good, to which the convict, Wisehammer, replies: "It doesn't matter when a play is set. It's better if it's set in the past. It's clearer...." By no means all of the response-plays commissioned by Out of Joint have chosen to locate themselves in the period of the original. As a modern companion piece to Three Sisters, for example, Wertenbaker's The Break of Day was able to contrast the differing attitudes to sisterhood and to the future embraced at the end of the 20th century and at its dawning. The verbatim play A State Affair (2000) revisited Bradford's deprived Buttershaw council estate 18 years on from Andrea Dunbar blackly hilarious classic Rita, Sue and Bob Too and delivered a devastating front-line report on how, in the intervening time, the working class had been written off and become an underclass, rotting in a hell of drugs and child abuse.

But the fact that there is some truth in Wisehammer's words is attested by an Out of Joint double bill, like Etherege's Man of Mode and Stephen Jeffreys's The Libertine (1994), a mock-Restoration comedy that examines the psychology and sociology of the "angry young man" syndrome. Premiered in the third term of a Thatcher government that despised public subsidy for the arts, Our Country's Good offered a humanistic lesson for the times with its warm, but unsentimental demonstration of the civilising effects of theatre on a group of convicts.

Set in the 18th century, A Laughing Matter likewise illustrates the benefits of throwing contemporary concerns into relief by showing them refracted through the preoccupations of the past. One of the pragmatic motives for Out of Joint's pairing policy is that regional venues are more likely to take an untried piece if it comes in on the back of classic. This neatly symbolises what is at issue in April De Angelis's play, which looks, through the travails of Goldsmith, at the recurrent tyranny of a taste that prefers revivals or crowd-pleasing tear-jerkers to mould-breaking new works.

It's ironic that She Stoops to Conquer was turned down by the theatrical giant of the times, David Garrick. "I've always found it intriguing that no good new plays survive from his 30-year period of office," says Stafford-Clark. "Was there a dearth or should he take some responsibility for failing to encourage new writers?" So Garrick's rejection of She Stoops represents every artistic director's deepest dread – to have the best of the future in your in-tray and decline it? "Oh, yes, that's the nightmare. I nearly turned down Road [Jim Cartwright's classic of Northern life] and I thought that Dorfman's Death and the Maiden was a conservative old turkey about a very important subject [retributive justice in post-totalitarian regimes] until Juliet Stevenson said, yes, yes, I'd love to be in it."

Pairing She Stoops with A Laughing Matter contextualises Goldsmith's comedy, re-sensitising an audience to the reasons why it was considered a powder keg of a play. "The history of riots," declares Stafford-Clark, "is the history of bourgeois absurdity and has, for the most part, come out on the side of the theatre. Look at Blasted (critics were falling over themselves to praise that when it was revived) or Saved, or Ghosts, or Playboy of the Western World."

But the Out of Joint diptych also puts you in touch with the pressures on Garrick (such as political censorship) that led him to play safe. "Part of Garricks's problem was that he had too big a theatre. It seated 2,300. Market forces caused expansion and made it harder to take risks with new work."

A Laughing Matter whisks you back to a culture where Dr Johnson could state, unironically, in a prologue he wrote for Garrick, that "The drama's laws, the drama's patrons give/For we that live to please must please to live". "The idea that the theatre should provoke people and challenge taste is mostly a 20th-century one, isn't it?" says Stafford-Clark. "Garrick would have found that a strange and probably revolting concept, but the play is saying that unchallenged taste is a dangerous thing. Goldsmith's verbatim speech [against actor-led, revival-infested theatre] – 'Is the credit of our own age nothing? Must our own times pass away unnoticed by posterity?' is the cry of the frustrated, unperformed dramatist that echoes down the centuries. The play also asks hard questions about the tendency, noticeable in all of us, to become more conservative in our judgements as we get older."

Well, not quite all of us. Stafford-Clark's own career has been characterised by an extraordinary ability to remain responsive to the zeitgeist. Through the past 30 years, he has played a prominent and influential role in most of the main schools of new writing – whether it be the women's movement (championing Caryl Churchill and others), the Irish brigade (bringing Sebastian Barry to the fore) or nurturing and directing a key text of the in-yer-face faction, Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking.

It turns out that his divining rod is on the twitch again. In the new year, he will be conducting two workshops. The first is with a gifted Irish discovery, Stella Feelihy, who has written "a teenage transition play about two young women growing up in Dublin". The second is with David Hare who is going to work with him on a major project about the decline of the railways and what happened when the ethos of the Harvard Business School took over.

By the sound of things, Stafford-Clark is still one of the directors least likely to land the Garrick Memorial booby prize for overlooking the key play of the age.

'She Stoops to Conquer' previews from 30 Nov and 'A Laughing Matter' from 7 Dec at NT Lyttleton, London SE1 (020-7452 3000). The double bill is currently at Birmingham Rep until 23 Nov and will tour in the new year (www.nationaltheatre.org.uk)