Why is theatre failing to address contemporary political realities? With few notable exceptions, argues Ian Flintoff, dramatists have forgotten the language of shock and replaced it with shocking language

Ideas aren't welcome on the British stage. Political ideas least of all. We are meant to be shocked by overused expletives and a bit of old-fashioned female nudity, as if teasing Mary Whitehouse were still the peak of invention.

The bleakness is not total. Richard Norton-Taylor took a deserved bow in these pages for the important work he and Nicolas Kent have done at the Tricycle Theatre in north London, staging political time bombs such as the Stephen Lawrence case and the Hutton inquiry. And I was astounded by the audience reaction of shock and pain to David Hare's The Permanent Way, with its unflinching post-mortem on railway privatisation and human slaughter. Michael Frayn's Democracy is intelligent and illuminating, and Norton-Taylor's forthcoming work on the Bloody Sunday inquiry is to be welcomed. But such well-crafted and non- patronising plays are rare, honourable exceptions to the rule of shallow titillation, rehash, social myopia and audience condescension. In times of great political moment such as our own, fresh and vigorous drama is the necessary antidote to the hypocrisy and fudge of those in power. In Britain today, our plays are for the most part dull and formulaic, self-esteeming, predictable and lazy.

It is not that long since Thomas Bernhard's Heldenplatz caused riots in the streets of Vienna by predicting the new rise of fascism. Arthur Miller punched the jaw of the McCarthy witch-hunts with The Crucible. Further back, the French acknowledged the plays of Beaumarchais as the drive to revolution. Vaclav Havel voiced political unrest in his plays before leading the velvet revolution. Shaw, Ibsen, Granville Barker and the plays of the Royal Court in the 1950s and 1960s forced Britain to take a good look at its political self. Plays are, and should be, dangerous. Today they are not.

We have Hollywood movie stars queuing to undress on London stages in the manner of old-fashioned end-of-pier peep-shows. We have characters who say "fuck" rather than become embroiled in the real world of political upheaval. "Fuck" is generally the height of our attempts to shock. Compare the pages of this magazine or any other of serious concern with the content of stage drama and you could be forgiven for believing that the producers of the latter lived in Wonderland. There are no plays about Britain's harshly divided society, about our unhealthy and compromising subservience to the US, about the gross disparities of wealth now equalled only in the third world. No plays about the failures of 1960s feminism for the majority of underprivileged women. No plays about the turbulent incomprehensibilities between the sexes. And though we have been in the European Union for 30 years, there has been no drama that is truly touched by this or responsive to it. Even the negativity is surely a source for examination. We remain culturally isolated, worse linguists than we were in 1973.

For most of our drama on stage and screen, a four-letter rigor mortis set in more than a decade ago. We are often presented with moving graffiti and nothing more. Which is not to say that drama should be a mere offshoot of politics. Far from that, it should be a searchlight and examiner. It should move more with the real-life political dramas of its time, and less with the finite and infantile shock horror of easy sex and violence. David Hare's take on Iraq, Stuff Happens, due soon at the National, sounds encouraging. We need more. We need writers with dirty hands. Foul mouths, however much fun they may be to the kiddies, are no substitute for the pain of ideas.

Visceral political conviction no longer hits the stage, so we find only the well-aired issues of drugs, homosexuality, race, stereotyped sexisms - important as these are. Occasionally, mild radical indulgences are allowed into the West End. Edward Albee may shock us with beastly metaphors, but the true political gaps are filled by documentary transcripts of events such as the Hutton inquiry, originating as often as not at the dedicated Tricycle Theatre. But bolder ideas just aren't there, and perhaps we have no writers adequate for the task. Hence revivals of Ibsen, Lorca, Miller, Chekhov and Strindberg. Or Shakespeare squeezed into a jelly mould for modern consumption. There are bizarre revivals such as The Quare Fellow and Rattle of a Simple Man, recently or currently in London. Interestingly, the most powerful political production of recent years was J B Priestley's An Inspector Calls, first staged many decades ago. Dead or forgotten writers are now the main source for political protest.

Where much of the media are purely self-seeking opportunists, conscientious drama is at a premium. Vulgarity and titillation may well be in the eye of the beholder, but the entertaining presentation of political and social ideas is universal in its value. We are being cheated of this by also-rans.

It need not be so. Ken Loach's dramas on television changed public perception about homelessness - even if they failed to remove the problem from the tolerance of politicians. And for all the hype of the "kitchen sink" dramas of the Fifties onwards, or the inflated milestone of Look Back in Anger, now marginalised writers such as Arnold Wesker did do something to vocalise the vehemence of young writers against injustice and inequality. "Angry Young Men" may have been a glib tabloid epithet, but it gave coherence to dozens of creative people who could not be ignored and who respected audiences as agents for political and social change. Drama has the power to move on social issues. It changes things, too. For example, accents no longer matter. Albert Finney, from Salford, played Luther, Coriolanus, Hamlet and Tamburlaine. It is thanks to this movement, and these workers, that no one today is shamed by accent.

It may be paranoid to suppose that the near-annihilation of theatres and new drama through severe funding cuts and rate- capping was part of the Thatcherite plan in the 1980s to censor the public airing and excitement of quarrelsome ideas. But it happened. There is a multitude of reasons why the public, and the young especially, have been pushed into political indifference. Among them is the diminution of sources from which they gather their stimuli and interests. Drama that does not patronise, that is created by those who are ready to stand and be counted, is vital to public awareness and therefore indispensable to democracy. Let us hope that those who come after the fuck-sayers - the new young writers - will have more to say than that.

David Hare's Stuff Happens opens at the National Theatre, London SE1 (020 7452 3000) on 1 September

Ian Flintoff is a former member of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre

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