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\\ "All writers ecstatics, so we can be seduced by the siren calls of extremism and drug '

'Sartre said that there are three kinds of writers: writers who write for God, writers who write for themselves, and writers who write for other people," says Howard Brenton. "I write for other people. The play doesn't reside in heaven, or in a library. As a dramatist, that's your instinct: without other people, the play doesn't exist."

This may be true, but not always Brenton wrote plays that are easy to observe. He fired first drew attention in 1969 Christie in Love, which depicts the serial killer John Christie masturbating in the garden where he buried his victims. Then there was Churchill Play (1974), a snarling attack on the soft-focus sentimentality of postwar British patriotism, and Weapons of Happiness (1976), in which an executed Czech communist is brought back to life in the improbable setting of a London crisp factory. Later came The Romans in Britain (1980), which produced an offstage legal battle after Mary Whitehouse took exception to its depiction of a Roman soldier raping a Celt.

Which raises the question: what kind of playwright is he? Looking across the full span of Brenton's career, it is genuinely difficult to say. For every brassy political satire (A Short Sharp Shock, 1980, with Tony Howard) there is a passionate study of romantic love (In Extremis, 2006); for every incendiary tract on religious intolerance (Iranian Nights , 1989, with Tariq Ali) there is a thoughtful examination of the nature of belief (Paul, 2005). Among the 40-plus plays Brenton has to his name â€" he claims not to remember the precise number â€" there are scripts devoted to the relationship between Percy and Mary Shelley (Bloody Poetry, 1984), and set on a modern-day British racecourse (Epsom Downs, 1977). Plus there's a novel, Diving for Pearls (1989), assorted screenplays and a volume of collected journalism. Brenton is surely unique in having divided the action of a play between the 1987 Conservative election victory and a utopian fantasy projected 700 years in the future (Greenland, 1988). He is certainly the only Marxist playwright I can think of who has written 14 episodes of a BBC spy thriller (Spooks, 2002â€"05). Whatever else he may be, Brenton rarely lets audiences emerge with their preconceptions intact â€" least of all when it comes to what he will do next.

Michael Grandage, who is currently directing his revised adaptation of Danton's Death for the National Theatre, agrees. "The perception is that Howard is one of our great political writers," he says, "but he is also a writer who surprises, because he seems to go much further: he has a poetic mind, but he's also a sensualist; his writing is very funny, but he's also someone with humanity. In terms of where he fits in, that's a problem â€" it makes him, God forbid, versatile."

Brenton was born in Portsmouth in 1942. His mother worked as a shopgirl at the Co-op, his father was a gentleman's outfitter who had aspirations to be an actor, but who ended up enrolling as a policeman. "He joined because it was a time of terrible unemployment," Brenton remembers. "It was the 30s, and if you could get that job, you could be secure and marry. But he hated the police, never functioned well in it." So during Brenton's teens his father took a surprise decision, to retire from the force and become a Methodist preacher. The family moved to Yorkshire, then to Wales.

The young Howard picked up the theatrical bug from his father. And when he progressed from Chichester grammar school to St Catharine's College, Cambridge, his mind was focused not on his English course, but on theatre. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he didn't really fit in. "I was a lower middle-class boy. I'd never even drunk beer, so I was rather out of place. I sort of blew up as I went along. I ran a magazine, acted, drank a lot of wine, lost my way." But he was also, crucially, trying to write. "And because of that, one of my tutors said: 'Look, I'll do a deal with you â€" don't do any work, but choose one thing and I'll teach you it.' I chose Ulysses, and we read it virtually for a year. I thought I was blowing my education, but I wasn't: I was having the best education you could imagine."

Joyce clearly left his mark on Brenton â€" you can sense it in the earthy, demotic language of his early plays â€" but other influences were less helpful. While still at Cambridge, he wrote an existentialist parable indebted to Genet called Ladder of Fools

This is something not always fully recognised about Brenton's writing: while his plays have frequently traversed difficult, even painful territory, they are rarely less than exhilarating to watch. Danton's Death is Büchner's great meditation on the consequences of the French revolution, but in Brenton's recent adaptation (his second) the play acquires a whipcrack, caustic sharpness. Pravda, the celebrated Fleet Street comedy Brenton co-wrote with David Hare in 1985, may have trained its sights on the very real threat of Rupert Murdoch â€" it depicts an ogreish press baron attempting to take over the British media â€" but it was the play's sheer energy that audiences adored.

Hare first met Brenton in the late 60s and brought him into Portable Theatre, a troupe producing work that focused on everything that was wrong with contemporary Britain. He remembers Pravdareception 'as well. "Bernard Levin, wrote the most vicious attacks on the game," he recalls, "we are told of two boys, who probably thought it was all terribly funny, hugging themselves with laughter, because so smart. He was right: We have to embrace a sense of themselves. This play is fueled by laughter. Howard 'humor is one of the most important things about him. "

Yet the humour â€" usually wild, sometimes literally explosive â€" is seeded with powerful themes. Brenton's plays have never been afraid to confront subjects that would make nervier playwrights run for cover. Arguably his first real masterpiece is Splendor

The play was inspired by two things, Brenton explains: his experiences in Amsterdam at the end of the 1960s, as peace and love were being replaced by something more politically sinister; and by the activities of the Angry Brigade, a group of youthful left-wing dissidents who planted bombs at a number of government targets in the early 70s. "They were decent, perfectly bright students who decided to blow up the Ministry of Defence, and then went to jail," Brenton says. "It was a tragedy of waste, really, and that became the play."

Having to do the dirty work in London, working behind the scenes to support his writing, Magnificence was a breakthrough for Brenton: a Royal Court commission that brought the political awareness of fringe theatre into the mainstream. As well as being heavily influenced by Brecht, it also bears the hallmarks of the situationists, in particular Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle (1967). "The book was a huge influence," Brenton says. "It argued that society was like a printed circuit board that operates along certain channels, without which the economy won't work. Public life is a massive spectacle that everyone pretends to be part of, but no one is. I thought that this was a brilliant analysis, and very interesting for a playwright â€" after all, what do entertainments do but disrupt the spectacle?"

So playwriting was a form of terrorism? "Disrupting the spectacle is a valid artistic aim; it can be enjoyed by writers and audiences. But I wasn't a bomber. There was a horrible psychodrama developing on the left at that time: middle-class Maoists telling you you're impure, bourgeois, because you won't go and kill someone. Horrible, but understandable. And interesting."

For all that Brenton remains fascinated by the psychology of terrorism, he was never a sympathiser â€" a distinction that has sometimes been lost on observers. In 1975 Theatre Quarterly headlined an interview with Brenton "Petrol Bombs Through the Proscenium Arch", while the fallout from The Romans in Britain saw him caricatured as a long-haired revolutionary. He still professes to be Marxist ("I wish I wasn't, but once you've seen the bare bones of the world in that way, there's no going back"), but in all other ways the contrast between Brenton's public and private personas is striking. He and his wife, Jane, have been married for 40 years; together they have sons, now grown up, and live in a quiet part of south London.

There have been genuine struggles en route, however. Having grown accustomed to major commissions at the National, the RSC and the Royal Court throughout the 70s and 80s, he later saw the work begin to dry up. As the 90s dawned, Brenton, like several left-wing playwrights of his generation, found himself out in the cold â€" left behind politically by the fall of the Berlin Wall, displaced theatrically by so-called "in-yer-face" playwrights such as Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill and Anthony Nielson. Despite the irony of being an arch-scandaliser who found himself out-scandalised, Brenton doesn't bear a grudge. "They were terrific writers, and had their own directors," he says now. "I was out of fashion, and the money began to run out."

Perhaps it's significant that one of the projects Brenton found himself beached on was an ill-starred attempt to adapt Calvino's 1952 novel Il Visconte Dimezzato (The Cloven Viscount): a whimsically fantastical story about a 17th-century aristocrat who is cut in half by a cannonball. Owing to a spot of miraculous battlefield surgery, Calvino's hero survives, but his two halves decide to go their separate ways: one side taking on all the bad aspects of his personality, the other all the good. Hearing the tale now, it sounds rather like a metaphor for a writer struggling to keep it together. "I was fascinated by the story. I even got a very nice letter from Calvino's widow. And the Deutsches Theater [in Berlin] commissioned it. What a gig! But I just couldn't do it; I got stuck, wrote this farrago of a play. They politely mumbled no, and that was it."

If the story illustrates Brenton's maverick enthusiasm, it also hints that something deeper was happening beneath the surface of his writing. That play may have foundered, but the idea stuck. When it came to rewriting for the National Theatre the story of the biblical Saul â€" a man whose revelation on the road to Damascus sees him reborn, but also tears him apart â€" Brenton realised that the theme had mysteriously resurfaced. "I finished Paul [in 2005], and my elder son read it, and said: 'Well, you've written it at last.' That's the theme, that's what I was going for: a man who is split in half, who goes from one extreme to the other." He pauses. "In the end, it doesn't go to waste. Everything gets recycled."

For Brenton's Saul/Paul, that Damascene epiphany isn't the final one. He is confronted by two further realisations, both shattering: that Jesus was married, and that the resurrection was probably faked. Yet, wary of endangering the rapidly expanding Christian church, tortured by self-doubt, Paul keeps both facts secret from his followers. The play attracted predictable headlines about religious controversy returning to the National, but there was plainly more going on than straightforward agitprop. Hare regards it as one of Brenton's finest works: "The beauty of the idea â€" that Paul knew that perhaps Jesus hadn't risen from the dead, but that he wanted the idea of the resurrection to transform humanity â€" is a metaphorical expression of everything Howard has always written about, which is the contrast between the need for a dream and the reality. I think it's one of the most remarkable plays of the new century."

Brenton 's first play in ten years, but also rekindled his interest in religion. "One of the impulses for Paul was the feeling that I couldn't write about Islam," says Brenton. "How can I possibly write about a suicide bomber, or approach any of the issues in that religion? But in Christianity I can â€" I know it well, I came out of its culture, even believed in it once." Christianity has, indeed, begun to look like Brenton's late, great obsession â€" a cohesive theme at last, or at least a hint that his Methodist upbringing is staging a surprise comeback. Before Paul he wrote In the extreme case (finally staged in 2006), a study of the relationship between Abelard and Heloise, which has been followed by a new play about Anne Boleyn that will open later this month, both at the Globe. Brenton is also in the middle of a follow-up on the life of Oliver Cromwell; a kind of companion piece, seen through the telescope of the other end of the reformation.

He may move more slowly these days â€" he walks with a stick, a concession to osteoarthiritis â€" but Brenton's mind is energetic. "Sometimes you look back at a scene and you can't remember writing it, you wrote it so quickly," he reflects. "It's very odd. This is why some writers lose it and start talking about the muse, or become mystics." But you sense that, for all his anguished examinations of belief, Brenton is not about to become one of them. "I've moved towards â€" not parable exactly, but towards history," he says, then checks himself. "For the time being, anyway. Who knows what will come out of the spinal cortex next month?"

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