Jean-Claude Carriÿre: Need a muse? Try a stray Parisian cat ...

A play is coming to London next week by one of the world's most distinguished writers. You may not have heard of him – but I'll bet you know his work. Cyrano de Bergerac, Belle de Jour, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Tin Drum, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie – Jean-Claude Carrière scripted them all.

A play is coming to London next week by one of the world's most distinguished writers. You may not have heard of him – but I'll bet you know his work. Cyrano de Bergerac, Belle de Jour, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Tin Drum, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie – Jean-Claude Carrière scripted them all.

His theatre work is less familiar. L'Aide Mémoire was a hit in France in the Sixties, and won the prestigious Moliere Award. It's been staged well beyond France's borders, too – but never in Britain. This week, however, the company Coup de Theatre is importing the play, retitled The Little Black Book, and starring Paul McGann and Susannah Harker.

"It was my first play," recalls Carrière, on the end of a phone line to Paris. "I was a novelist and screenwriter, I was 36, and I'd never thought about writing for the theatre. Everybody was telling me 'theatre is dying, people prefer technology, special effects'. But I had this desire to write a play."

That play, he explains, had its roots in a particular incident. "I was alone in Paris in 1967. My wife was in the south, expecting our daughter. I was sitting in our apartment one day, and a cat entered. He looked around my place and decided to take a nap. I tried to tell the cat that it was time to leave. But he didn't leave; he stayed all night. On the third day, I bought him some food. I was beginning to love the animal when, one day, without any reason, it left. Forever."

For an animal lover, heartbreaking. For a writer, an inspiration. Carrière extrapolated a love story in which a mysterious woman intrudes into a man's apartment. "The action of the play lasts three days. But these three days could be three weeks, three months, even three years. The two characters go through all the emotions and comic situations that can happen between a man and woman."

So universal was the play's appeal, and so illustrious Carrière's cinema pedigree, that efforts were made (by Milos Forman, among others) to recast L'Aide Mémoire as a screenplay. It couldn't be done (although it was later filmed for TV). "And that's nice," says Carrière, "that some stories resist adaptation." He and the surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel, who enjoyed a 20-year collaboration, tried and failed to adapt Malcolm Lowry's classic novel Under the Volcano to the screen. "If you take the literature out of it," explains Carrière, "nothing is left. Some dramatic situations must remain what they are."

Carrière knows what he's talking about: he's the writer of a respected autobiography-cum-treatise on cinema, The Secret Language of Film. The book proposed that cinema had radicalised the way we tell each other stories. But the medium that defined the dramatic vocabulary of the 20th century, says Carrière, is feeling its limitations in the 21st.

"At the beginning of the history of film," he says, "everything looked possible. A century later, we realise that film is still a flat rectangle projected upon a screen. It has not, like the theatre, developed radically throughout the century." Here's a surprise – a film practitioner defining theatre as the more progressive medium. But Carrière makes a convincing case. "The theatre in the last century has put actors and audience in the same space, in the same atmosphere. Which is impossible in film. You can't get the spectators into the film itself. That may be why theatre all over the world is more alive than ever. Because theatre is the only place where actors and spectators meet in person."

Unsurprisingly, this notion of theatrical communion strongly recalls the work of Peter Brook, for whom, in the early Seventies, Carrière adapted the Indian epic, The Mahabharata. That now-legendary production, says the writer, was a life-changing experience.

"Knowing The Mahabharata," he says, "gives me a key that allows me to get in touch with anybody in India, be they a philosopher, a Brahmin or a peasant. It's like possessing a language." Carrière is just back from India, now his "second home", where he lectures on The Mahabharata at the Indian PM's request. "I will die," he says, "still working on The Mahabharata, and maybe in the next life I will still be learning it.

"My dream of eternity would be to go through space with Ganesh, the god with the elephant's head, just telling stories to each other. That would be a very nice way to spend eternity. Telling stories is an endless occupation. It lasts forever, because we can invent new stories all the time."

'The Little Black Book': Riverside Studios, London W6 (020 8237 1111), 25 February to 15 March