I think as a writer it’s very important that you never get drawn too much into the bubble of theatre. You’ve got to stay outside and make sure you’re looking around you and having conversations about other things, and to me that’s the perfect place to be.”

Mike Bartlett is an Olivier award-winning writer, multiple times over. He’s had BAFTA winners Katherine Parkinson, Ben Whishaw and Tim Pigott-Smith in his plays. It’s easy to forget this as I chat to him. The overwhelming sense is one of honesty, thoughtfulness, and an appreciation and indeed embodiment of a quality that seems to be required to achieve such greatness in theatre: that of truth.

He became a writer not by design, but because it suited him better than directing, where he found it difficult to sell himself for assistant directing jobs rather than selling something that he’d created. It’s worked out well since: artistic collaboration in theatre is what he finds appealing.

“That’s genuinely why I haven’t directed my own work. I love working with a sort of partner in crime to make something together, and as long as that relationship is good you, in my experience, end up with something that’s better.”

The latest partner in crime is Rupert Goold, current Artistic Director of the Almeida Theatre who directed the 2014 future-play King Charles III. It played to great success in London and will be at the Cambridge Arts Theatre from October 19th 2015 as part of its tour of the UK. It imagines the royal family, with Prince Charles now King, amidst a tabloid scandal and political unrest. Bartlett by no means made it easy for himself. Aside from the magnitude of the play’s premise, he has also written it in iambic pentameter. “I had the idea and it was so daunting that I didn’t write it for about a year and a half.” He explains, “I knew Shakespeare pretty well and I’d been reading and watching it for years, but it’s a whole extra step then to say ‘well I’m going to have a go at writing it’. The only way I could start was just reconciling to the fact that it’s not going to be as good as Shakespeare.”

Taking the form seriously certainly puts it in vulnerable and inevitable dialogue with Shakespeare; it is a play in five acts, there is a ghost and a comedic plot. “Charles, who is our tragic hero and protagonist, can turn to the audience and use metaphor to talk about how he’s thinking.” But rather than being an academic exercise, a classical structure supports the dramatic tension Bartlett envisages. “That way of him articulating thought in a theatre, in a forum, is perfect to explore what Charles genuinely thinks about his position in the world. You couldn’t do that in a naturalistic film or even in a naturalistic play. So only through the form can you approach that bit of truth. That’s the joy of theatre.” Winning Best New Play at this year’s Olivier awards, it certainly seems to have found that truth.

An understanding of his craft and a boldness to experiment with it pervades our conversation. It’s delightful to hear that it doesn’t end with the rehearsal room. He questions the place of theatre in society and is aware of the inequalities that persist and their effect on audiences. “When I was a teenager theatre was very much the theatre that originated in the sixties: Pinter, David Hare, Tom Stoppard. Although they might have been radical in their day, it had all got very stuck. I remember going to the National Theatre and it was like a car park, it was dead, there was nothing going on, everyone looked miserable and there were these big stately plays that other people went to who were older than me.”

The idea that some plays are not for certain people seems to be one that Bartlett opposes, and still an important problem in the current theatrical scene. Thankfully, the theatre that he had seen did not restrict where he would take inspiration from, and by the time he was studying English and Theatre at the University of Leeds, the car park atmosphere of The National was just a memory. “At university we really noticed that we would draw on anything. We’d love Moulin Rouge as much as we liked Chekov. We wouldn’t care about high art and low art. We just wanted to move between the two effortlessly.” For a writer who has moved between finding compelling drama in climate change as in Earthquakes in London, to a three-hander centred on a bisexual love triangle like Cock, to his most recent BBC One drama Doctor Foster, an openness to eclecticism only makes sense. “I think you see it in a lot of playwrights now, Lucy Prebble, Lucy Kirkwood, me, lots of companies that don’t worry about being popular and avant-garde at the same time. And, actually that’s a very Shakespearean model in itself.”

It is important for those who create theatre to consider what they are contributing to, and also where parting with the past is beneficial. By referencing the classical canon in King Charles III while questioning conventions of UK theatre, from marketing to the accessibility of toilets in venues, Bartlett understands the crucial balance of these forces. “There’s more energy [now] and there are more young people going, but I think it’s still hugely stuck in a single demographic. You still get a lot of people in theatre in different ways saying that they’re making theatre for people like them and not for other people.” We talk about Rufus Norris’ recent appointment as the National Theatre’s Artistic Director and the hope of drawing in more diverse audiences. “It’s about constant interrogation of what you’re doing and making sure you don’t put barriers up for audiences that you actually want but are putting off.”

“I don’t think you have to swap one audience for another, I think you can do both, you can totally do both you just have to work harder.”

Ultimately it seems to come back to truth, and with truth comes a connection to humanity. With Bartlett’s committed search for drama as a path to honesty, theatre is in good hands.