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By 1966, having married a picture researcher, Beryl Kevern, the previous year, he joined Queen Mary College, London, where he never rose above the position of lecturer because, in academic eyes, he never published anything. To the rest of the world, he appeared prolific. His emerging preoccupation with human enslavement — which led from middle-class living-rooms to Stanley’s expedition in his masterpiece The Rear Column — was evident from the beginning. Television plays continued in tandem during the late Sixties with an evolving stagecraft.

Wise Child (1967) was originally intended for television, but — despite Kind Hearts and Coronets — it was thought outlandish to have Alec Guinness in drag. Eighteen months on, Dutch Uncle, with Warren Mitchell, appeared to make too light of the Christie case for contemporary comfort and was judged to be the worst first night in living memory.

Undaunted, and after a version of The Idiot that is, rightly, more Gray than Dostoevsky, he set about Spoiled. Seething, with a homosexual undercurrent, it shows the savage monologues for which Gray was becoming known.

Despite a three-week run, it pointed towards the multi-award-winning Butley, which followed six months later. With Alan Bates in the eponymous role and the beginning of a long association with Harold Pinter as director, Gray was in his stride. The play is a marvel of economy, neoclassical in its day-in-the-life timescale, replete with wit and badinage. Like Osborne and Orton in their subverting of theatrical convention, Gray always created a “well-made” play. Bates’s was a bravura performance (reprised effectively in the 1973 filmed version).

The sharpness of Butley is echoed in Otherwise Engaged (1975), in which Simon Hench, a prosperous publisher — again played by Bates — hopes to have a quiet time (so to speak) spent in listening to discs of Parsifal. He, too, is beset by a series of disturbances. In its abiding preoccupation with chaos and order, the play is palpably in the Butley mould.

That made his next play, The Rear Column (1978), a surprise to some, although the subject had been presented to the fictional publisher Hench as a book proposal: Stanley’s march to the relief of Emin Pasha in 1887, and, in particular, the fate of his rear column, left at Yambuya. If the matter — including a flogging and cannibalism — is different, the preoccupations are similar. Gray once said: “It’s the one I’d want my reputation to stand by.”

On the face of it, Gray’s next play, Close of Play (1979), returned to the drawing room, but this was an Eliot-like take upon it. One role, given to Michael Redgrave, in a last appearance, required him to be immobile, seemingly dead, while the family wrangle around him.

History and allegory being commercially uncertain prospects, Gray appeared to retrench with Stage Struck (1979), again with a lacerating Alan Bates. This is an out-and-out thriller, and, as such, highly enjoyable.

Gray was prolific in the Eighties (duly leaving both Queen Mary College and his wife after two decades; in 1997 he married Victoria Rothschild). Quartermaine’s Terms (1981) was an affecting account of an end-of-the-line teacher, while the literary magazine life of The Common Pursuit (1984) — partly inspired by his friend Ian Hamilton and the New Review — is a witty take upon university life and ideals revisited. Its wit is made all the sharper when taken in tandem with Gray’s diary account of its production, An Unholy Pursuit (1985); this was augmented by his account How’s That For Telling ‘Em, Fat Lady? (1988) of putting on the same play in America.

Gray was fond of giving the impression of living a harum-scarum existence. But if prone to an appearance of open-necked dishevelment even when dressed formally, Gray was a consummate professional, able to turn his hand in many directions.

In the mid-1990s it looked as thought he was set for a commercial jackpot. He had already depicted in a radio play the relationship of George Blake and his jailmate Sean Bourke, who helped the Soviet spy escape from prison. And he had written a television film, Old Flames, for Stephen Fry, who had also found success in a revival of The Common Pursuit with a cast of his celebrated contemporaries previously unknown to Gray. The subject of Blake and Bourke was inherently fascinating; and, to cast Fry and Rik Mayall in an account of it would surely attract a wide audience.

In the event, it would all end in another Gray prose volume, Fat Chance, subtitled “Stephen Fry Quits” Drama: an echo of the numerous billboards after the actor vanished from the Albery and was eventually spotted, Bruges-bound on a ferry, apparently victim of a bad review in the Financial Times.

The wonder is that a much-battered Gray survived it. Without the off-stage drama, the play Cell Mates would be recalled as midweight Gray.

After With a Nod and Bow and Just The Three of Us finished out of town, Gray had hopes of The Late Middle Classes, to be directed by Pinter, but it was declined by Trevor Nunn at the National. Its vicissitudes, with Pinter still on board, became subject of Enter a Fox, subtitled Further Adventures of a Paranoid.

It was another diary that brought him an unlikely late success. By his own account an addictive personality, Gray had managed to conquer his alcoholism, though only after years of very heavy drinking had brought him to the point of collapse. Smoking was the addiction he thought he could live without, though he knew that with it he would not live much longer at all. The volumes of The Smoking Diaries chronicle his not entirely convincing attempts to give up. But if that makes them sound like some dreary self-help book, then nothing could be further from the truth. Discursive, funny, sometimes profound, Gray’s idiosyncratic extended memoir is an appealing and affecting look at a life lived to the full.

Simon Gray was appointed CBE in 2004. His wife survives him, with a son and daughter of his first marriage.

Simon Gray, CBE, dramatist and author, was born on October 21, 1936. He died of a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm on August 6, 2008, aged 71