David Storey looks amiably earthy as he sits in his North London kitchen, but he sounds like a Victorian spirit medium. In 1967 he virtually freeassociated six plays in as many weeks, among them Home, the revival that opened yesterday as part of Peter Hall’s Bath season. But then Storey has always found pre-planning counter-productive, once ditching a novel on which he’d toiled for aeons. “I’ve had wonderful themes and spent up to two years researching them, and they come out as illustrating that theme, not as organic work.”

Storey, now 75, is best known for his novels, among them the Booker-winning Radcliffe, but nearly 40 years ago he had a stream of successes at the Royal Court, notably Home. He began that with nothing in his head but the chairs left onstage at the end of another fine play, The Contractor, and then “it was as if someone else dictated it”. Two characters appeared, whom he first thought were expatriates in a Moroccan hotel, but, no, they told him they were patients in an asylum. And they became John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson, classical actors wanting to recharge their careers but daunted by the Court’s radical reputation: “They were hugely nervous and found it very frightening,” Storey says.

Rehearsals had offbeat moments, thanks to the knights’ habit of interspersing long private conversations (“where do you get your shoes repaired?”) into the dialogue. But all was well when a mix of British and avant-garde American actors came to a run-through. “You don’t really mean it,” called Gielgud, openly weeping as they stood and cheered. “Yes we do,” they chorused. Their enthusiasm didn’t seem justified when Home opened in Brighton and seats kept banging as people walked out. “Always a good sign in Brighton,” Richardson said, and Home duly triumphed at the Court and in the West End.

There were hitches. At one performance the knights jumped five pages without knowing it. At another, a spectator had a fatal heart attack, bringing down the curtain. “I thought they’d find this devastating,” Storey recalls, “so I crept on to the stage and all I could hear was Gielgud saying to Richardson, ‘Was it your cue or mine?’ ” But their terror was a plus: “It gave them a kind of vibrancy and emotional intensity; they were completely mesmeric.” In the Bath revival their roles are played by David Calder and Stephen Moore.

Storey relishes such anecdotes, yet admits that he’s a melancholy man who finds writing a way of using and relieving his bleaker feelings. Home, he thinks, is a state-of-the-nation play that also reflects his temperament: “There’s always a sadness at the end of my work, isn’t there? And selfdivision seems to be a theme.”

He means the painful gulfs between mind, emotion and body that he has expressed in work often drawing on personal experience. He’s the son of a Yorkshire miner, and studied art at the Slade. Like the men in The Changing Room, which will be revived this autumn at the Lyric, Hammersmith, he played professional rugby. During a particularly unhappy period he commuted between Yorkshire and London, trying to reconcile the game’s brutalities with the Slade’s sensitivities.

Mark you, the Slade had its violent moments. Storey became president of the student union and recalls an annual dinner that began ominously, with Lucian Freud bringing along a huge dog instead of his wife. After slobbering over the distinguished guests, it took her place at the table and ate her portion of chicken. Then students began to set fires and throw objects, one of which knocked out a girl. It was only after the pandemonium ended that Stanley Spencer was found morosely staring at his hands. “I can’t take the risk of coming to another Slade dinner,” he said.

Storey still draws at the home he shares with his wife of 53 years, and composes fiction. One new novel is with the publishers; another, hand-written, is waiting to be transposed to his trusty electric typewriter. But since Stages at the National in 1992, he has finished just one play, about a troubled psychiatrist, that has, he says, been rejected by everyone. There aren’t likely to be others — but, as this year’s revivals show, Storey the wry, touching, always observant dramatist hasn’t been forgotten.

Home is previewing at the Theatre Royal Bath (01225 448844, www.theatreroyal.org.uk), and opens on Tues. Until Aug 1

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