If you had one word with which to sum up theatre legend Peter Nichols, creator of stage classics such as A Day In The Death Of Joe Egg and Privates On Parade, it would be honesty.

Right from the start of conversation he tells it like it is, whether it’s discussing current Joe Egg star Miriam Margolyes’s one-time fondness for fellatio (as confessed on Graham Norton’s TV chat show) or the performance of previous Egg leads; Eddie Izzard’s 2002 TV film effort was over-boiled, thanks to his self-referential ad-libbing, while acting giant Albert Finney was “too big”(in performance terms) for the part. “Yet Clive Owen, in 2001, was quite fantastic,” he says.
Nichols is also honest enough to reveal that the great Joe Orton once declared Joe Egg, the story of how an ordinary couple, Brian and Sheila, cope with the arrival of a mentally handicapped child, to be “sentimental rubbish”.
Yet, while the 84-year-old playwright is a warm, colourful conversationalist (he throws the F-word around like an abstract artist throws tins of paint), it’s Nichols’s refusal to be obtuse that’s so attractive. For example, when asked if Joe Egg has legs -- since its Glasgow conception in 1967, it has played three times on Broadway, won a Tony Award and is set to return to its birthplace at the Citizens next week with Margolyes joined in the cast by comedian Miles Jupp -- the rangy writer says he’s not sure.
“The whole climax of the play involves getting money to pay for the telephone,” he says, relaxing at his penthouse apartment in Oxford, while his wife Thelma pours coffee. “Now we all have mobile phones. But, as for the illness, that hasn’t changed. The play is always on somewhere,so I guess it’s become a sort of classic.”
No guesswork is needed. However, Nichols admits his play should never have made it on to the professional stage. Not that it wasn’t good enough; but it faced obstacles which would have tested the resolve of Sisyphus. For example? His agent hated it, the subject matter was almost taboo, and the minimum stage age was 18 while the play called for a 10-year-old to play the handicapped child. To add weight to the playwright’s boulder, Joe Egg violated the (then) dramatic convention in breaking the Fourth Wall. But to top it all Nichols, writing for the theatre for the first time, wrote Joe Egg as a comedy.Who in their right mind, I ask him, would stage a play with big laughs featuring a child with brain damage?
“Nobody,” he says with a wry grin. “I’d tried everybody. No producer or theatre company would touch it. And though my agent was a dear, amusing woman, she hatedmysort of plays.Yet I had a real feeling Joe Egg would work.”
Thelma had given birth to daughter Abigail -- nicknamed Abo -- five years earlier (the baby didn’t develop normally and they believed Thelma’s over-drugging during labour to be responsible) and the experience was too powerful not to commit to typewriter. But how did Joe Egg (in the play, Sheila’s grandmother uses the phrase “sitting about like Joe Egg”) ever make it on to the Glasgow stage on May 9, 1967?
The writer reveals a story of incredible fortunes.“It began with The Dave Clark Five,” he says, referring to the 1960s pop group. “I’d been writing TV plays at the time when an offer came from director John Boorman to write a film script about the group. It was an odd thing for me to consider, so I said, ‘Why should we do this?’ and he said,‘I’ll get a Hollywood contract and you’ll get enough money to let you afford the time to write a hit stageplay.’ And that’s exactly what happened. John landed Point Blank with Lee Marvin,  and I got £5000, which at the time was colossal, and it paid off our debts.”
But how did the unwanted play come to be picked up? “An actor friend of mine, Michael Blakemore,was going up to Glasgow to act at the Citz and, by pure chance, David Williams, the Citz director,went to Israel and left Michael in charge. Now, Michael was wondering what to put on, called me up and asked if I had anything. I sent him Joe Egg and he made it happen.”
Was it quite that simple?
“No, not at all. The play was rewritten -- I don’t remember how many times -- because Mike felt it too strong. And there was the device of breaking the Fourth Wall to deal with. In fact, Michael was so tentative overall, he commissionedAndy Park to write the music, to help soften the experience.”
The play was cast between the friends -- Joe Melia, Zena Walker and Joan Hickson were the original actors -- but the next challenge involved getting past the censors, who claimed an actress playing the child shouldn’t hear the couple use the line “Let’s go to bed”.
“We argued her character was mentally handicapped, so she wouldn’t know what we were on about,” Nichols says. “They replied, ‘Ah, but the actress isn’t. She’ll know.’ It was f****** ridiculous. To get round it, we rewrote the scene with the actress in the wheelchair being pushed offstage at that moment.”
Finally, Nichols could look forward to his limited three-week run. Events, however, were to conspire to take the play to the world stage. But for that to happen, the alchemy -- the writing, direction, casting and music -- had to be perfect. Which it was.
“The first production was, I think, the best,” Nichols says. “You see, Mike really understood what I was saying in the play and that was if something like this happens to you, if you haveachild with mental illness, it’s not Greek tragedy.You just get on with it. I told Michael at the time, ‘This is Noel Coward,not Strinberg’ and that’s the way he directed it. Unfortunately, the play has been misdirected since so that people indulge the tragedy, as was the case with the film with Alan Bates and Janet Suzman. It was like Euripedes.”
The early box office wasn’t great (no surprise there, given the subject matter) but a terrific review in the Scottish edition of The Guardian was expanded to the national editions after Blakemore made a begging call to the newspaper. The following day, agents, critics, producers and actors followed the star that was Joe Egg to the Gorbals.
But how difficult had it been to write about such a difficult period? “The writing was problematic, like all plays,” Nichols offers. “The great Scots dramatist James Bridie once said, ‘Only God writes good third acts -- and then not often.’ You see, anybody can start a play, but finishing? You need to send the audience out content. Joe Egg has a very good ending, but I’ve only managed that about twice.”
Did the playwright feel guilty about drawing from his own experience? “Neil Simon and Alan Ayckbourn also write about their own lives a great deal, but I think of this as a bonus rather than a penalty in life. You have an experience and think, ‘This could add up. This could work.’”
Joe Egg certainly wasn’t about eliciting sympathy. “The image I had of Joe Egg was of parents standing next to the wheelchair, talking to the child as if she were normal,”says Nichols. “What also helped was, by the time the play was written, we had three kids. After Abigail, we made a conscious effort to have another. But the truth is I’d never really wanted children, which also helped me to write the play. I think someone who’d been desperate to have a child would have been destroyed by it.”
It’s this sort of bare honesty that makes Nichols’s writing so powerful. This, and his critical faculty. “What? You didn’t know I’d played Dracula in Glasgow?” he quizzes me, grinning, at one point. “Haven’t you done your homework?”
But it’s his dark, no-nonsense humour that’s helped push the creative boulder over the hill time and time again. At the end of the interview, when asked about how he coped with the harsh reviewers, he recalls the experience of The Times theatre critic Harold Hobson, who “hated Joe Egg”.
“It could have been down to subject matter, and possibly the fact Harold was crippled and used a walking stick,”Nichols recalls, his face deadpan. “Or it could have something to do with the fact Thelma literally ran into him one night in a theatre -- and knocked him right over. Perhaps that’s what prompted Hobson to say a current Brian Rix farce was way better than Joe Egg.” He breaks into a laugh. “Little b*****d that he was …”
A Day In The Death Of Joe Egg is at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow, October 19-November 21. Visit www.citz.co.uk.