First Pinter for Star Wars star Ian McDiarmid with The Caretaker

We’re in London, at the tail end of the 1950s, in a derelict room stuffed with junk, detritus and a bucket for the leaky ceiling. Enter two men: the room’s occupant, the gentle and damaged Aston, and Davies, a mercurial drifter whom Aston has brought in from the streets. Soon they’re joined by the building’s owner, Aston’s brother, the explosively unpredictable Mick.

“It is wonderful,” Ian says. “Pinter writes about life but he writes about it in a highly particular way but the particularity is the poetry that is underneath the naturalism. There is always something going on underneath that is equally sinister and disturbing. I saw an interview with him and he was asked ‘You write and you act and you direct but how would you describe yourself?’ And Pinter said ‘If you want to tie me down in one word, then I would say poet.’ And that is absolutely right. Things are invoked in Pinter's works. You see the power struggles that are going on in The Caretaker but underneath that there is definitely a poetic undertone.”

The Minerva theatre was famously a favourite theatre for Pinter himself, and Ian can see why: “It is perfect for Pinter and also particularly for this play which very much is an enclosed not just room but world. Everybody will feel that they are part of that world. It is very intimate and very closed and the Minerva will be just right.”

Ian, known to millions as Emperor Palpatine in Star Wars, said: “It is my first time for Pinter and I've always wanted to do Pinter but it just never happened for some reason. The first time I came in connection with Pinter was The Homecoming which I saw when I was down in London auditioning for drama school. I saw it and it was just stunning and I just thought that this was something to aspire to.

"And when Jonathan (Kent who is directing The Promise in Chichester this summer) and I were running the Almeida I wanted to do a Pinter play, and Betrayal was the one we wanted to do. So we contacted his agent and she said ‘I don't think Harold will let you do that one.’ But Pinter said he loved the Almeida and said ‘Why don't you put on paper the people that you want to be in it and just give me an idea of it.’ We did that and he telephoned and said ‘Let's have lunch’ and we had the best lunch we had had in years. He said we must do it which felt a great honour and made us feel very responsible.”

Betrayal ran at the Almeida Theatre in 1991 directed by David Leveaux with Bill Nighy playing Jerry, Martin Shaw playing Robert and Cheryl Campbell playing Emma.

“Harold was quite a forbidding presence until you got to know him. The thing about Harold and us lot as actors was that he was an actor too. When he was with actors he was just another actor and that was that gentle musing cameraderie that always existed which was lovely.”

The Caretaker is Ian's first time back in Chichester since Six characters in search of an author “which was wonderfully weird in a good way!”

Tickets from CFT box office.