Abelard and Heloise enacted

Calm before the storm: Abelard and Heloise share a tender moment in Howard Brenton's In Extremis. Photograph: Stephen Vaughan

Sex, death, religious fundamentalism and castration ... not obvious ingredients for a medieval love tale, perhaps, but with playwright Howard Brenton that's exactly what you get. His new play, In Extremis, opens this week at London's Globe and promises to be one of the summer's last big theatrical events.

Based on the true story of Abelard and Heloise, it's a love affair between one of the most radical thinkers of the 12th century and his talented female pupil, an affair that goes gruesomely wrong when Abelard's enlightened teaching falls foul of church orthodoxy.

Brenton has never fought shy of controversy: previous plays have lampooned Churchill, satirised Thatcher, and even suggested that St Paul may simply have been suffering from epilepsy on the path to Damascus. That's not even to mention the scandal ignited by Brenton's The Romans in Britain (1980), which criticised the British presence in Northern Ireland and ended up in court when Mary Whitehouse took exception to it.

Even so, the 63-year-old Brenton still has plenty of fire - and he's never been busier, he told me when we met a few days ago in the middle of final rehearsals. As well as talking about the impetus behind the new play, he describes why some of the greatest works are near-failures, reveals his artistic heroes (it's the only time I've heard Oscar Wilde and Michel Houellebecq mentioned in the same breath) and explains why it's such a thrill writing about people dangerously ahead of their time.

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