Our Friends in The North became famous on TV but is being staged at the Oxford Playhouse in its original form as a play. NICK UTECHIN talks to its author, Peter Flannery

Few writers have penned the work for which they will be defined before their 30th birthday. But that is exactly what happened to dramatist Peter Flannery in 1982, when his epic play Our Friends In The North was first staged at the Barbican.

Nearly a decade and a half later, he adapted it for television, and its showing on BBC (nine episodes, each an hour in length) in early 1996 made Flannery famous and created stars of Christopher Ecclestone and Daniel Craig.

Amazingly, the Northern Stage touring production coming to the Oxford Playhouse next week is the first time Our Friends has returned to the stage since its original outing.

I asked Peter Flannery, who has lived in Wallingford for the past ten years, why such a long delay?

"Theatres are generally run by directors and I suppose there's not usually much in it for a director's career to do the second staging of a play. This revival came about because this specific director, Erica Whyman, wanted to 'bring the play home' to Newcastle."

For Newcastle is one of the three primary locations Jarrow-born Flannery places the action of the play - the others are Soho and Rhodesia. For good measure, it uses 14 actors playing 43 characters and covers the years from 1964-79, using many historic events in dealing with issues of corruption, dirty deals and power-broking.

"I wanted to write about the damaged idealism that was all around me throughout the generations, and about the nature of governance. How and why did the country sweep a Thatcher into power?

"I thought that Labour would be out of power for the rest of the century, that we would see large-scale civil disobedience and that the political process was probably infected with cynicism forever. Corruption in public life clearly had something to do with this, so I got T. Dan Smith's number from the phonebook and called him. He told me: 'There's a play here of Shakespearian proportions'."

Which was spooky, really: Flannery was, at the time, Resident Writer at the Royal Shakespeare Company's then-London base, the Aldwych Theatre.

"They happened to be doing all the History plays. I simply loved the particular Englishness of the stories and the way they dealt with history in epic style. My only job as Resident Writer was to write a play about anything I wanted, but it would have been perverse to write another four-hander about student life when the acting and production resources of one of the world's leading companies was being put at my disposal."

Which is how Our Friends came about. But it wasn't an easy time for Flannery. He told me that the Labour Party as a whole had been hostile to the play while he was researching it and that Leftish-inclined reviewers disliked it. He also maintains that the security services tapped his telephone for years afterwards.

In his programme notes for the current production, Flannery writes: "Its research and execution began my own long journey towards the almost pitch-black scepticism with which I now observe our political culture."

He was bleakly practical when I asked him for a modern example: "Do we need look any further than the pack of lies the Blair government told us about Iraq?"

He is also practical in a more constructive way. For this new production of the play, "I found a Prologue and an Act One scene that I'd written but never used in 1982 and I've reinstated them.

"The play was written by a young man (28) who rarely used one word when three would do, so I've cut 20 pages. And I've rewritten the ending again. The original version had three different endings - one each for the openings at Stratford, Newcastle and London - and they were all hopeless. I think I've finally got it right."

Peter Flannery wrote seven plays in the 1970s. Then came Our Friends, one further successful play (1989) called Singer - a return visit to corruption and Rachman-like sleaze - and then no fewer than 16 years away from the stage.

"I was fully occupied by screenwriting during that time, but there was another reason why I didn't write for the theatre. Nobody revived any of my existing plays so I couldn't see any point in writing any more new ones. I just stopped thinking of myself as a playwright for a while."

But he never stopped thinking about himself as a Northerner; when I asked how he finds Wallingford, he mused: "The rolling hills of Oxfordshire are no match for the Pennines or the Cheviots or the miles of sandy beaches in Northumberland. But at least it doesn't rain all the time. It's just a relief not to have to spend so much time getting to and from London."

But a new play is in the pipeline, to be produced at the National Theatre next year. There are also scripts for a Channel 4 serial called The Devil's Whore about the English Civil War, somewhat surprisingly for such a grittily-committed writer a Poirot script and a TV detective series starring Martin Shaw.

"But, of course, I love the way Our Friends is loved by so many people. The other day I had a letter from Brendan Foster, the former world record-holder, telling me he thought I'd created a masterpiece. It's not everyone who gets a fan letter from his boyhood hero and it made me feel blessed by life and grateful to the friends and neighbours in the North East who gave paper, pencils and books to a little boy."

Our Friends In The North is at Oxford Playhouse from Tuesday until Saturday, March 15. Box office: 01865 305305.