The hot tickets are for serious drama

So there's nothing new about the current dismay. But the particular genius of our culture is in its reduction of all human experience to a series of grotesque extremes.

Life's beautiful, life's hideous. I'm right, you're wrong. She's a saint, he's a crook. You're hired, you're fired. Forget the crooked timber of humanity: we're warped beyond repair.

And salvation comes in three-minute hits on YouTube, where it hangs around for a couple of weeks before its magic charm wears off after its inevitable exposure as another sham, more evidence that there is nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon.

The theatre has sometimes joined in with this binary comic strip of triumph and disaster. Because it's what's out there, and in its filthy way, it's entertaining.

And we're no strangers in the theatre to the wishful thinking that underlies the happy ending. In the real world, the underdog generally has his leg bitten off by the overdog. On stage and screen, it's the Rottweiler who's left licking his wounds.

But if we tell tales about the ones who beat the odds, we're responding to a basic human need. When the world seems hopeless, it is no small thing to provide entertainment that can lift an audience's spirits, if only for the hours it spends in the theatre or the cinema.

In the past, bad times have often been good times for the entertainment business. It looks like the same is happening now.

Billy Elliot has swept the boards on Broadway, and why wouldn't it? It's a superbly told story of triumph against the odds (though it bucks the trend in its insistence that talent is by no means enough, that it must be wedded to back-breaking hard work and discipline.)

Meanwhile, War Horse has travelled from the National Theatre to the West End, and is the best-selling play in London. The play doesn't shirk the fact that millions of horses (and men) were slaughtered in the First World War.

It chooses to tell the story of the one that came through. In times like these, who can blame an audience that roots for the survivor?

But I will make a confident prediction: the hot tickets in London this summer will be for Shakespeare, Chekhov and Racine.

There is, and always has been, a large audience for theatre that looks beyond the simple certainties of popular entertainment.

As the mass media turn their back on complexity, the theatre audience craves it. The most valued plays are those that recognise that experience is ambiguous - that it contradicts itself.

That an honest response to life acknowledges that joy and terror exist simultaneously. That truth is elusive, but that the search for it is worth more than an arrogant announcement of its discovery.

Over the next few months, sold out houses, a thousand strong, will discover again that honesty, intelligence and nobility of mind can be a crippling handicap (Hamlet).

That the destruction of a decayed old order is necessary and absolutely heart-breaking (The Cherry Orchard).

That obsessive love is an affliction that can turn a woman into a stalker (All's Well That Ends Well) or prompt her to accuse an innocent young man of rape (Phedre) - but that in both cases the audience will stay with her, will not easily condemn, will not turn tabloid editor and cry witch.

At all of these plays, the audience will share the particular pleasure of a living encounter with the past.

Another marked feature of the serious public's response to our current woes has been its embrace of history.

There is a generation of accessible historians who have insisted that an understanding of the present is impossible without an examination of the past, and they have made the journey thrilling.

The most illuminating insights into the financial crisis, by miles, are Niall Ferguson's in The Ascent of Money - a miraculously lucid account of how we arrived where we are now.

Only on stage, though, does the past become literally alive, often in worlds more interesting than ours, patterns of thought more challenging and emotional lives more vivid.

There's a profound satisfaction in the exploration both of the gulf between the landscape of the past and our own, and in their congruities.

Some things never change, some things change utterly: all add to our understanding of ourselves.

Meanwhile, the playwrights of our present continue to address the contradictory real world. We're fortunate. My continental counterparts are amazed by the vigour and popularity of our contemporary playwrights -theirs lost touch with the larger audience long ago.

It will not be long, I'm sure, before someone here weighs in with a response to the bank catastrophe.

It will become part of a London theatre that is thriving because it provides escape, because it both satirises and embraces a debased popular culture. But above all, because it is serious. And it turns out that serious is what the public wants.

Nicholas Hytner is Director of the National Theatre