In the theatre, some trades are like carpentry, their virtuosity more or less subsumed in the thing made: a lifetime of experience of things other than wood may lie in the joints and dowels, the grain and the glue, but it is the accommodation and proportion of the finished chair that the carpentry draws attention to. Other tasks are like the making of stained glass, which may be as devotional and also as practical, but which cannot but broadcast the flair of the design, the particular vision of the artist. If good acting starts as an example of the latter case, and at its very best approaches the inspired anonymity of the former, then directing and writing, safeguarding and requiring each other, are of the former. It is perhaps no accident that Arthur Miller has a passion for woodwork comparable to his energy as a playwright. The three jobs are certainly specialised, seeming to call for different profiles: it is rare to find two of the talents in the same person, leave alone three. We do not know if Shakespeare was a good actor, and there was no such thing as a director in his day; Molière's entrepreneurial skills (or at least his understanding of patronage) are beyond doubt, but it seems that his desire to be a tragedian was at odds with an inevitably comic stage persona, and so the writer in him had little competition. Chekhov delivered brilliant brief insights, usually in letters to his wife, into how his plays should be acted, but I think he would never have had the patience or forbearance to co-ordinate the traffic of a whole production, so those qualities were reserved for his writing instead: and history is silent on his acting potential. In the case of Harold Pinter, a big surprise arrives. He has dominated our dramatic landscape as a writer for over forty years; but he started life as a professional actor at the age of nineteen, and soon afterwards toured Ireland for five seasons in Anew McMaster's company, playing a repertoire of everything from the Greeks to Shakespeare to Agatha Christie.