“No matter how brilliant your panel of judges – and ours was – the whole enterprise constantly stumbles over the big truth that the art of standing up in public to tell a story through words and action is as old as humanity itself, so that its beginnings can never be known, and that even when we know that a major theatre event took place, a vital element of that event, in this most live and transient of art forms, disappears for ever when it passes beyond living memory.”