Sams's one-man-band rolls in

There are two words Jeremy Sams dreads. One is "polymath". The other is "ubiquitous". They tend to go hand in hand. In a week in which his production of Noises Off opens at the National the night after his adaptation of Anouilh's Mademoiselle Colombe premieres at the Bridewell, it is an appropriate moment to ask: is Jeremy Sams really everywhere and doing everything?

He has not so far acted in, designed or produced a show. But he has translated, adapted, directed and set plays to music, and translated opera libretti. He has sung - albeit "horribly" - one of his own compositions at a recent fundraiser for PEN. He has even caressed the ivories on a cruise ship. The suggestion that he has the broadest frame of reference in town is hardly undermined by his current pair of commissions. Q: What two things do Wagner's Ring and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang have in common? A: Both contain flying and both are currently being adapted by Jeremy Sams.

So it shouldn't really have come as a great surprise when Sams was approached by Michael Frayn and asked to direct Noises Off. "He liked the pace of Spend Spend Spend," says Sams of the show he directed that snatched the Best Musical gongs from the jaws of The Lion King. But you can bet that's not the only reason that Frayn, another certified polymath, liked Sams. Noises Off is a play within a play, in which the audience gets to see what happens both on stage and off. Perfect for a director who has spent his career doing two things at once.

However, we should hear the case for the defence. Sams had no idea that Mademoiselle Colombe, which he translated eight years ago, opens this week starring Honor Blackman. "Does it really? Bloody hell, it always happens that way. Then I'll get called ubiquitous yet again."

The idea that Sams, who studied music and languages at Cambridge, commutes between words and tunes like a fledgling Sondheim is no longer quite accurate. The last play for which he composed the music was Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, and that was in 1993. "I did that to work with Trevor Nunn, to learn as a director. I'd done a few shows but I still wanted to see how Trevor did it. Being a musician and hanging around rehearsal rooms I've seen all my contemporaries directing."

The thing stopping Sams from being the ultimate all-rounder is his proximity to another mentor. At 43, he really ought to have written his own musical by now. The problem seems to be Stephen Sondheim. Five years ago Sams directed Passion (starring Maria Friedman, with whom he has a child). "I'm such a mad fan. If you can't do it better than Sondheim what's the point? I very much doubt I'd have the patience or indeed the inspiration to sit on my own for a year and write a musical. But one day I will have a bash."

In the meantime, in Noises Off he has been given the keys to the tuck shop. It's the latest of a string of plays from the early 1980s to be revived in London recently. "Perhaps there's a 20-year rule. They are mostly playing theatre tricks. Is it theatre or is it life? Noises Off starts off with a similar scene. Is it a play? Is it reality? We don't know. Those imaginative tricks still feel imaginative now."

Sams has asked the author for some elisions, and Frayn has made his own changes. "There's nothing dated about the piece at all. We're setting it in the middle 1990s, so the play itself, Nothing On, is an old play they're touring. You could still possibly tour it now, to be honest. One of Michael Frayn's big preoccupations is how do you get through life if the world you know falls apart. It's a rather Chekhovian thing ... In this case, the known world is the theatre company. They can still have a row and try and kill each other but still have to do their exits and entrances. I find the need of these actors to stick to what they know rather touching."

Noises Off, in the next-door theatre to Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, follows Ayckbourn's House and Garden and requires the same sort of rigid directorial discipline. "They are both shows in which both sides work. Imagine a piece of embroidery where the back makes a pattern as well as the front. It's the same conceit. It has been a real full-circle job for me. There are so many technical aspects you can't do it in freefall. It's more like composing, or orchestrating. You've got to make it shine as if it was just made up. It's the hardest thing I've ever done in my life."