Gained in translation: Ranjit Bolt and (top) a scene from Cyrano de Bergerac

Ranjit Bolt had just murdered his printer. It was a “diabolical machine,” it was driving him mad and he wanted to kill it. Unfortunately, the 47-year-old writer and translator had thrown it against his computer and killed that as well. He was now locked in a verbal wrangle with his insurance company which had outsourced its services to a call centre in Bangalore. Evidently the call was getting nowhere.

“These bloody Indians,” he was shouting, as he let me into his Hampstead flat. “I’m Indian myself, but where do they get these people?”

It was almost as comical a setting as the plays that Bolt so often adapts and brings skilfully to the London stage. “I’m going to kill somebody,” he yells again, and grins reassuringly at me, as he simultaneously tells the hapless call centre worker on the phone: “Not you. I’m not going to kill you. I meant the person before you.’

While the call centre puts him (once again) on hold, Bolt discusses (with remarkable sobriety) his family, being Indian, and his latest show Merry Wives for the Royal Shakespeare Company, a musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor starring Judi Dench, for which he has written the lyrics.

Bolt has become an essential feature of West End theatre adaptations. Be it Molière, Brecht or Aristophanes, he can be relied on to get into the heart of the play and bring it with a unique twist before the audience.

While Merry Wives is opening next month, another of his adaptations is running at the New Players Theatre. The Marriage of Figaro, which Bolt has adapted from the original 18th century French play by Pierre Beumarchais and set in Mughal India, has been entertaining Londoners for the last few weeks. The upstairs-downstairs comedy, The Marriage of Figaro, later immortalised by Mozart in his opera, finds a lively home in 18th century India where a randy Nawab makes a perfect match for the randy French count in the original play.

Directed by Jatinder Verma, who has used the Bhavai theatre style, the French original effortlessly blends into the exotic Indian setting.

As far as literary and theatre families go, Bolt has pedigree. His father Sydney Bolt was a literary critic and taught English at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge , while mother, Jaya, was an English teacher. The biggest influence inevitably was his uncle, Robert Bolt, award-winning playwright and husband of actress Sarah Miles, star of films like Ryan’s Daughter. It was “Uncle Robert’s” highly successful play A Man for All Seasons that set the young Ranjit Bolt on the path to being a writer.

“My mum came into the room and told my brother and me, “Your uncle has had a huge West End hit, why don’t the two of you write a play?” My brother wrote a play and never attempted one again, but I wrote Henry II, a play with 72 scenes, each half a page long. I was only seven years old. I asked my parents to send it to the BBC. They wrote back with a polite note asking me to come back 20 years later!”

While Uncle Robert and Aunt Sarah led the bohemian high life with Hollywood stars and playwrights dropping in for dinner, Ranjit’s own family was very middle class, sober, literate and “Labour supporting.” “I was always writing from an early age, translating from Greek classics, or French, even while I was in school,” he adds.

With his two maternal aunts, Manek and Mahil, married to Frenchmen, Bolt’s childhood was spent visiting his aunts, one of whom lived in a French chateau in Savoy and the other in a flat in Paris. “I guess I got a real feel for the French language from my uncles,” says Bolt.

His translations of Molière’s Tartuffe have been staged at The National, and Pierre Corneille’s The Liar and The Illusion performed at the Old Vic. Bolt’s adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac has been staged at the National. In Britain he has worked with top directors like Peter Hall and Jonathan Miller and given an Indian twist to Molière and Rostand with Jatinder Verma.

Even though the family is quintessentially English, Bolt says he has always felt completely Indian. “I’ve never felt English,” says the writer who grew up in Cambridge, studied in Oxford and lives in Hampstead. “I guess my mother’s influence was very strong. She inspired me to read and always gave me books. Being from Kerala, she had a strong tradition of poetry in her. Then there were my aunts in France and cousins in Birmingham. Despite the strongly English side of the family, I always felt completely Indian.”

After completing a degree in Oxford in Classics, Bolt moved to a job in the city which left him “so bored” that he started translating, plucking French and Greek plays and bringing them to English audiences with a new energy and interpretation. Eventually he had enough on his plate to give up the city job, though he lost his girlfriend in the bargain.

With Merry Wives, he is exploring writing lyrics in rhyming verse. “I’ve always wanted to do a play in rhyming verse,” said Bolt, who like fellow Indian author Vikram Seth (Golden Gate), wrote a novel in verse called Losing It. It is a homage to Hampstead, the exclusive patch of North London that he has lived in for the last 20 years.

“Tagore lived down the road, Keats was here, there are a lot of literary influences …” says Bolt dreamily. Though translations have been his forte, he feels he is now moving towards being a lyricist. His favourite musicals have been My Fair Lady, Sound of Music and West Side Story. “A good musical needs at least six or seven great songs that stay with you,” says Bolt.

Could he see himself writing lyrics for A.R. Rahman and Bollywood style musicals done in the West End ? After all, Lord of the Rings, with music by Rahman, opens next year in Covent Garden and Andrew Lloyd Webber did Bombay Dreams in 2002. “I’ll do anything if the work is right,” laughs Bolt.

He admits he doesn’t watch Bollywood films and the Khans and Bachchans have passed him by. “I love Satyajit Ray,” he volunteers almost apologetically. I offer to send him a copy of Hirok Rajar Deshe, Ray’s film done in rhyming verse. He looks delighted, not at all like someone who could murder a printer and a call centre worker, all on the same day.