It’s a sunny afternoon in London’s theatreland when I meet Martin Crimp. He’s suggested Cafe Koha, a cosy bar tucked between the stage doors of the Noel Coward and Wyndham Theatres behind Leicester Square. Over orange juice he tells me how he came to be a playwright.

‘It was all a matter of chance - though I was never going to be anything but a writer, the question of how and for whom was unsettled.’ It so happened that it was a theatre that first accepted Crimp’s writing, and his first six professional plays were staged at Richmond’s Orange Tree Theatre. (His very first play, Clang, was produced in Cambridge while he was a student here - directed by Roger Michell of Notting Hill fame.)

While reading English at Cambridge Crimp wrote and acted a little but was underwhelmed by the experience. ‘Although I loved theatre, I was not in love with the theatre scene. It was all a bit self regarding and...effervescent.’ Hopefully things have changed since his day, as it is the ADC’s upcoming production of his play Cruel and Tender that I’ve come to talk about.

Cruel and Tender was commissioned by director Luc Bondy, with whom Crimp unusually discussed each section of the play as it was completed. I wonder whether handing a script over to the director is anything like giving a baby up for adoption. Continuing the metaphor, Crimp tells me a play is ‘more like a child you look after. There’s lots of you in it, it’s full of your DNA, but you must learn to let go.’

Cruel and Tender is based on Sophocles’ Trachiniae, the tale of Deianira’s unthinking part in the death of her husband Heracles. Unsettled by thoughts of Heracles’ infidelity, Deianira decides to make use of a love-potion given to her by the centaur Nessus after he helped her across a flooded stream - for which Hercules killed him when he thought the horse was enjoying it too much. Deianira sends a robe soaked in Nessus’ potion to Heracles as a homecoming gift - and immediately has misgivings about the friendly intentions of a dying centaur towards his murderer. When Hercules dons the robe he is consumed by mortal pain and Deianira kills herself.

Crimp takes Sophocles’ story - down to the structure of each scene - and fits it to a new millennium. Heracles becomes a General returning from military action in Africa; Deianira is Amelia, an army wife; and Nessus is her old flame, a researcher in psychotropic warfare. Sophocles’ Chorus, the women of Trachis, are rendered as Amelia’s domestic staff - housekeeper, physiotherapist and beautician.

Crimp describes his writing career as ‘two-track’, combining writing original works with translations (which have recently included Moliere’s Misanthrope, Ionesco’s Rhinoceros and Bruckner’s Pains of Youth). While he characterizes translating as a job of transferring a text from one language into another, originating material is ‘difficult and mysterious and impossible to say how it comes about’. There is no simple structure to it - ‘there are no given rules in art anymore. No five act plays and sonata form. You have to invent your own rules.’

Responding to Sophocles’ text meant working with rules Crimp didn’t necessarily agree with. He tells me the Trachiniae is often considered an unsuccessful, broken-backed play: the first two thirds follow one protagonist and the last third concentrates on a new one and the pair never meet. It is rarely performed nowadays. Crimp decided to turn this weakness into a strength: he uses the fractured structure to create two opposed worlds - the female domestic domain against the male military realm.

Crimp found the Heracles in the Greek text a horrendous character, almost demonic - a powerful and violent man who longs to murder his wife for the pain she has unwittingly caused him, he is only annoyed that he can’t kill her himself when he finds she has already committed suicide. In an attempt to make him slightly more sympathetic Crimp plays on the idea of the General’s insanity.

‘In the Greek, the moment Heracles comes on stage the verse goes haywire, with lyric outbursts unusual in the whole Greek canon.’ The strange two-syllable lines and onomatopoeic phrases which express Hercules’ distress put Crimp in mind of mental illness, and so the patterns of the Greek verse triggered Crimp’s characterization of Heracles as mad. The portrayal is part of Crimp’s wish to look more closely at what he calls the ‘default left-wing British liberal thinking that all military people should be demonized.’ The General himself emerges as a victim: to the government minister John, the General is useful and then expendable with the changing circumstances.

Conceived in the aftermath of 9/11, Crimp admits that current affairs were very much on his mind as he thought out his play. Though the axis of the story is shifted from east/west to north/south, there is a ‘lie at the heart of the play’ closely related to events in Westminster: ‘Tony Blair lied to parliament. You can’t get round that.’ Though it avoids being journalistic, Cruel and Tender is very much a political play.

I ask if he has any advice for aspiring playwrights. After a pause he says slowly, ‘Read a lot of plays.’ He quotes Luis Buñuel who said, ‘what is not founded in tradition is plagiarism.’ By way of explanation Crimp tells me of his involvement in assessing and selecting new scripts for the Royal Court theatre, and the day Sarah Kane’s first play Blasted came through in 2001. Everyone at the meeting knew it was something different and exciting. ‘And about six months later we were inundated with pseudo-Sarah Kane scripts.’

‘So what Buñuel might mean is that without roots you’ll just copy the last thing that was fashionable. To write you must find those deep roots. You must know what others have done, as well as what they are doing now.’

Cruel and Tender opens at the ADC on Wednesday 2nd November at 11pm.