last saw Ronald Harwood, who has died aged 85, at Harold Pinter’s funeral almost 12 years ago. I led a convoy of cars towards what I thought was the appropriate site in Kensal Green cemetery only to find that I had missed the turning. When I apologised to all those who had blindly followed me, Ronnie looked me in the eye and said: “As so often, Michael, you’ve been leading everyone in the wrong direction.” I took the remark as affectionate mockery. But it strikes me that the observation, both in its suspicion of critics and its tart humour, might have come straight out of The Dresser: Harwood’s most enduring play that, ever since its debut at Manchester’s Royal Exchange in 1980, has been revived all over the world and successfully adapted for film and television. Harwood wrote countless other plays and won an Oscar for his screenplay for The Pianist but he will always be known for The Dresser and professed to be surprised by its continuing popularity. It is, after all, the story of an uncured old ham, known as “Sir”, who dies during a wartime performance of King Lear attended by his dresser, Norman, who enjoys a love-hate relationship with his employer. Where is the universality in that? But one of Harwood’s gifts was to have written two glorious lead roles that actors will always want to play. In Britain alone, Sir has been played by Freddie Jones (the original casting), Albert Finney, Anthony Hopkins and Ken Stott, and Norman by Tom Courtenay, Ian McKellen and Reece Shearsmith. In every society there is a veteran heavy who longs to play “Sir” and a fleet-footed actor drawn to the waspish loyalty of Norman. Watching the last West End revival, in 2016, it struck me that Harwood’s play is fascinatingly equivocal in its attitude to the theatre. It is full of well-honed jokes (such as Sir’s remark that he “was pleasantly disappointed” by a rival’s King Lear) and is a tribute to the endurance of actors who continue to play Shakespeare in the face of wartime air-raids. Yet the play also offers a totally unsentimental portrait of the grottiness of theatrical touring. Sir’s supposed wife, “Her Ladyship”, at one point rounds on her decaying partner to announce: “I’m sick of cold railway trains, cold waiting rooms, cold Sundays in Crewe and cold food late at night. I’m sick of packing and unpacking and darning tights.” Those lines could only have been written by someone like Harwood – who, having been Sir Donald Wolfit’s dresser, knew the grim realities of life on the road. Harwood was a highly accomplished dramatist who, not unlike Simon Gray, had the capacity to write thought-provoking plays that appealed to West End audiences: he wrote particularly well about the South African diaspora and – in his excellent study of the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, Taking Sides – about the nature of music and politics. But I suspect it is The Dresser, in which the relationship between Sir and Norman uncannily echoes that of Lear and the Fool, that will be his permanent claim on posterity.