Or the flavour of the decade, Lee Hall (“there’s something profoundly inauthentic going on… Thus far it’s hard to tell if he wants anything but success”). Or, yet again, certain members of the old guard, such as John Mortimer (he “has the look of a Faust who has said yes to the devil so many times that he has got nothing to trade with”) and Tom Stoppard (“it’s rather like dealing with a lunatic who keeps telling you he’s got a map showing where he buried his underpants but he’s eaten it”).The introduction to the book contains the cheeky note: “I have been counselled not to include a list of those who are omitted, so as not to offend those who are omitted from the list of those who are omitted.” Quite a tease, that, given the number of luminaries who would surely have settled quite happily for being overlooked.In the two weeks since its publication, the book has become notorious for its audacious jibes. They’ve certainly got The Full Room noticed, but by buying into the culture of the sound bite in this way, hasn’t Dromgoole conspired in distracting people from the book’s underlying argument and its passionately celebratory vision of Nineties theatre? After all, nobody forced him to structure the book as 100-odd mini-essays (some as short as the jokey one on Yasmina Reza – “Yasmina Reza est trÿs riche”), with its general insights sprinkled in no particular order among them, nor, indeed, to preface the whole with a disclaimer protesting that “this is not a book of criticism” because criticism is a subjective “nonsense based on what someone had for lunch, when they last shagged, where they went to school… or their athlete’s foot”.Dromgoole, who looks a bit like a stockier version of Griff Rhys Jones, defends The Full Room on the grounds that “it probably is excessive, but it’s meant to be excessive as a corrective” – a corrective to the kind of criticism that affects an Olympian authority “as though it were interpreting the tablets for us” and comes with a smug Platonic recipe book for what makes a good play, and to the culture of theatre practitioners in which “loathing for everyone around them builds up like a great ballooning cancer, but they’ll never say a word, because it’s a great arse-lickers parade.”Hence, the reckless candour, the “deliberate anti-coherence” (on occasion, hard to distinguish from incoherence) and the calculated “levelling effect” of the alphabetical ordering.

Dromgoole started to write an attempt at an authoritative overview, “but it was grotesquely false as it was coming out of my pen. I thought it was more useful to follow my own voice.”This director has never been overburdened with diplomacy. When he ran the Bush, his social style at press nights was in marked contrast to that in operation at the Royal Court, where Stephen Daldry, a dab hand at PR schmoozing, would greet the critics with a “Hi, gang” and inclusive questions (“How do we feel about x?”) calculated to give everybody the warm, temporary illusion of being on the same side. At the Bush, the most you’d get from Dromgoole would be some dark glowering from the other end of the bar, and a long vituperative letter if your review did not pass muster.Perhaps, in developing a scornful detachment from the success industry in theatre and from the inky reputation-makers, it helps to be second-generation in the profession Dromgoole’s father, Patrick, was a well-known director. He mounted the first production of Entertaining Mr Sloane but did not see eye to eye with its priapic author.

“Joe Orton became slightly obsessed with him,” his son recalls, “and when he wrote that screenplay for the Beatles, Up Against It, every one of the Beatles in turn goes to bed with a character called Miss Patricia Drumgoole.”What he learnt from his father, he says, is “a gratitude and reverence for writing when it is good, a terror and hatred of it when it isn’t, and,” he adds with one of his head-thrown-back guffaws, “a superhuman arrogance about being able to judge which is which”.His lack of inhibition about segregating the sheep from the goats is bracingly apparent in The Full Room. The great divide for playwriting, Dromgoole argues, came with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism. That liberated the emergent generation “from the shackles of Marxist critique and reductionist point-making” and allowed a free-for-all of individuality. It’s a scenario that more or less involves Dromgoole casting the David Edgars and the David Hares of the preceding orthodoxy as the Ceausescus and Honeckers of the piece.His warm praise for the supple humanism and flexibility of form in the work of Sebastian Barry, Billy Roche, Jonathan Harvey, Richard Cameron et al is based on the distinction that they “write life”, whereas the “miserabilist” old guard, with their “privileged despair” and their dreary state-of-the-nation plays “rehearsing arguments already settled long before the audience arrived”, merely “write about” it. Not that Dromgoole sees a clean break between the generations.

His essay on Mark Ravenhill, author of Shopping and Fucking and leading light of the “blood and sperm” school, shrewdly notes his affinities with Edgar and Hare.That perception is borne out by the fact that, since the book was written, Hare’s last play, My Zinc Bed, has turned out to be extraordinarily similar, in set-up, to Ravenhill’s recent Some Explicit Polaroids. At the centre of both, there’s an improbable old-style leftist (in Hare, a communist turned dot millionaire; in Ravenhill, a socialist extremist released, with his ideals unreally vacuum-fresh, after 15 years in prison). Both plays betray a nostalgia for the old Cold-War ideological certainties in their depiction of the resulting moral chaos (a world where addictions have replaced convictions).But whereas Hare’s piece is all passionate argument, Ravenhill’s play is intriguingly divided along the lines Dromgoole has intimated. The political debate feels thin compared with the depth and insider knowledge that the dramatist brings to the depiction of the same new confusions on the private level (here, through gay men who now have to face up to life, rather than a death sentence from Aids).