The play inspired by the character he called Miss Helen proved to be another breakthrough for a master playwright who gained prominence with "The Blood Knot," a 1961 work about two half brothers.

But as a master playwright, Shakespeare makes sure that an audience watching the play becomes so involved in the mounting excitement of the plot that these problems of time are unimportant.

It is to humanity's good, and to the theater's, that the end of apartheid has freed a master playwright to contemplate the nurturing of a noble life rather than the politics and the polemics of racial injustice.

Through the 1960s, it was known primarily for staging the representative works of master playwrights Guo Moruo, Lao She, Cao Yu and Tian Han.

Music and dance will be added to the Signature's presentations, as will a series of world premieres of its so-called "master playwrights" in their largest theater, a 499-seat proscenium.

Still, a master playwright's unfailed talent to entertain and empathize with outcasts, their vacillations and their revelations means that self-involved characters are rounded by compassion.

Had it not been appropriated by another master English playwright after Coward, "Betrayal" would actually be a far more apt title for Mr. Penhall's three-hander, which has a double-edged title.

THIS week, television viewers are treated to adaptations of a master playwright's works, a Kurosawa thunderbolt, a suspenseful cross-country train ride and a sizzler about twins who swap identities.

So the Crossroads staging by A. Dean Irby is an uncommon chance to see another take on the panoramic sweep of a master playwright.

But Mr. Friel is a master playwright, not a politician, and such departures into polemics are few and brief.