Darkness of the dons

Lucy Hodges talks to Steve Waters, whose new play lifts the lid on academic fallibility

A darkly comic drama about academics behaving badly opens next month at the Hampstead Theatre in north London. Written by Steve Waters, a former school teacher who is now training teachers at Homerton College in Cambridge, it lifts the lid on academic life, showing the insecurities and passions that drive intellectuals in their professional lives.

But After the Gods is more than a play about eggheads. "It encompasses the human condition," says Waters. "It asks such questions as how do we judge each other, how do we assess our own behaviour. These are the kinds of questions we all have to face."

This is Waters's second play at the Hampstead Theatre to be directed by Gemma Bodinetz. The first, English Journey, about a disintegrating relationship, was staged in 1998 to mixed reviews. But it made the playwright visible as a writer, and gave him the courage to leave full-time teaching.

The trigger for the new play was the autobiography of Louis Althusser, the French philosopher and structuralist Marxist who killed his wife and slid into obscurity. The Althusser character in the play, Michel Beaudricourt, is also a legendary postmodern French philosopher. Beaudricourt commits a terrible crime at a conference in Aberystwyth, when he is away from home and surrounded by his peers. "The play looks at how the next generation of postmodernists addresses this huge moral black hole," says Waters. "It strips away your reflex ways of reading the world."

Again like Althusser, Beaudricourt has gone into decline. Having been, effectively, buried alive with his wife in Brittany, he is brought back to public view by a powerful woman called Kate, who works as a translator. The play is full of the ironies of life: academics having to meet students who have gone on to great things; students returning to settle old scores. There is politics of all kinds: gender politics, career politics, academic politics and real politics. It is a delight for students of literary theory.

One female academic becomes besotted with another, an expert in queer and post-colonial theory. According to Waters, the play demystifies the way that intellectual life is conducted. "I would be disappointed if people came away saying, 'That was interesting. That was a play about academics.' These people are grappling with the same problems that we all deal with. They're using the language that we're using, only it's more refined and arcane."

It would be wrong to describe the play as unkind to academics, he thinks. Waters's wife used to teach English at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, and some of his best friends are academics, he says. "There's something really quite interesting about academics," he adds.

'After the Gods' is at Hampstead Theatre, London NW3 (020-7722 9301) 12 June to 6 July

l.hodges@independent.co.uk