It says all that needs to be said on the subject of the dramatist's current feelings about Fry that he wouldn't put it past him to accept such a part Not that Gray will ever provide a script. The war as a way out for the suicidal man of honour: you feel that Gray understands the appeal of that. He's certainly in no doubt that the Hench of Simply Disconnected, a bastard who has committed a kind of spiritual suicide but who is not without a certain sense of personal honour, would have fought fearlessly in the trenches. The BBC has bought the rights to Fat Chance and even made the tasteless suggestion that it might be filmed with Stephen Fry and Rik Mayall playing themselves.

Gray, the father of two children, interprets Rivers, who ran Craiglockhart Hospital, as a father manque involved in the cruelly ironic business of restoring the "sons" he loved to psychic health so that they could be sent back to the trenches to be killed. The final scene shows Sassoon running across the German lines like some rapturous maniac offering himself up to a death that eluded him. Commissioned to adapt the first two novels of Pat Barker's trilogy, Gray found himself going back to the historical sources and writing a much more personal film which the studio that owns the rights is never going to make. In Fat Chance, he mentions this blow as being one of the causes of the breakdown he suffered, confessing that "the subject of [Sassoon in the War] reached far too deeply into me, overthrowing me really emotionally".Talking to him about this and reading his excellent script, you sense a strong imaginative identification with men for whom the war came as a hideously double-edged chance to sublimate painful sexual ambivalences in caringly paternal relationships: the commanding officer to his men, the doctor to his patient. It's curious, we agreed, how the art of biography tends to dwell on the way parents shape their children, when the way children shape their parents is also of huge significance.Symbolic fatherhood surfaced as an issue, too, when I brought up the question of his film script on the topic of Siegfried Sassoon during the Great War. Concerned with the "impossibility of escaping the genetic trap", it looks at how, by surviving our fathers, we - in some odd sense - swap roles with them, becoming our father's father.

Father-son relationships cropped up a lot in our conversation. He has just finished, he reveals, the first draft of a play about his own pathologist father. He was never there: why should they let him be now? The play, though, is studiedly ambivalent about its hero. Gray says that Hench's "refusal to answer to other people on any question, including the question of whether he wants to live or die, seems to me both worthy of respect and contemptible simultaneously".The theme of frustrated paternity will be given an intriguing spin in Richard Wilson's premiere production at Chichester by having the drug addict played by Alan Bates's real-life son, Benedick. "My play has one advantage," says Gray; "it's shorter" - a comment that suggests a less than total admiration for Osborne's last work. Now a childless widower, the hero of Simply Disconnected is, Gray believes, "in hell and, in a sense, dead. I think he begins to discover the value of new life as the day proceeds, and it's too late."The young, married cleaning woman is pregnant, possibly by Hench; it's likely that he's the father of the screwed-up drug addict who arrives out of the blue claiming to be the bitter fruit of one of his loveless couplings on the office floor But both of them reject Hench's desperate offers of help His belated need to be needed goes unanswered.