Wanted: a producer for Peter Nichols’s four new plays

Gosh. I wouldn’t mind being Peter Nichols. Eighty-six this month and still enjoying the easy domesticity and professional stimulation he’s benefited from since the 1960s when he was propelled to stardom by his play about raising a disabled daughter, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg. He lives in a penthouse flat in north Oxford on the verge of cow-dappled meadows, tufty footpaths and a low grey canal full of quacky coots and ducklings. He’s fit, sharp-witted and fun to be around. (After our interview he and his wife called a cab and went off to Corpus Christi to knock back champagne at a summer party.) He dismisses his age with a paragraph of jokey self-evaluation. ‘I’m a great one for, “every improvement makes it worse”, but that’s the age I’m at. It’s quite comfy actually, it’s quite nice. You can rail against everybody and berate them all for being young. Which is what I want to be. But now I can’t. So I’m angry about it.’ Not quite angry. Caustically amused, perhaps. He’s still producing new plays. Is he shouty at work, like some dramatists?

‘I was. For a long time I used to walk up and down reading all the words. But then you acquire a sense of exactly how the lines should read. When you give it to the actors, of course, they do something different with it. Actors will get it wrong if they can.’

His bankability has oscillated over the years but he’s riding a wave of public favour right now. Passion Play, his comedy about middle-aged bed-hoppers, is playing at the Duke of York’s (until 3 August). Simon Russell Beale starred in a hit production of Privates on Parade at Christmas. And Joe Egg was revived earlier this year at the Rose, in Kingston, and starred Ralf Little.