Irish actor Michael Gambon has called British playwright Harold Pinter, who died of cancer this week, a god for actors. Pinter penned dozens of plays including The Caretaker and The Birthday Party, as well as scripts for the films The French Lieutenant's Woman and Sleuth.

By Lee, Veronica Alan Ayckbourn, so theatre lore has it, is the second-most performed British playwright after Shakespeare. So why has he become so unfashionable among theatre cognoscenti? Partly, it's his own doing.

By Paul Taylor Peter Brook wrote the bible for 1960s theatre's revolutionaries with 'The Empty Space' and, at 83, is still relentlessly pushing boundaries. He tells Paul Taylor why he has to live in the moment Peter Brook is shouting at me. Loudly. And he's shouting at me about Shakespeare.

By JEFF SIMON It isn't that Evelyn Waugh was a man incapable of discretion and moderation. It's just that he was a man who, among many things, understood the pleasures of extravagant opinion.

By Lawrence Toppman, The Charlotte Observer, N.C. Jul.