Opening in Dublin tonight, Dennis Kelly's play about love and toxic debt in a time of consumption can turn a laugh into a gasp in an instant. But he is more of an optimist than his work would suggest, he tells PETER CRAWLEYin breaks from editing the final episode of his TV comedy series, 'Pulling'

SLIPPING OUT OF a London television editing suite into a quiet corridor, Dennis Kelly is facing a quandary that sooner or later confronts all writers.

“What would you do?” he asks. “How do you bring those lives to a close? Do you have them all going off somewhere? Do they all get shot? Or does a bus blow up?”

He was being facetious, but if any writer was going to consider such options for his characters, it would be Dennis Kelly, easily one of the most wickedly subversive writers for stage and screen.

The characters in question belong to Pulling, Kelly's scabrous comedy co-written with his long-time friend and collaborator, Sharon Horgan.

Following the engagingly dissolute lives of three flatmates, the series regularly elicits a gut laugh and a curled toe (usually with the same joke) and, like much of Kelly’s writing, it mines a vein of comedy which represents another shade of black. A promiscuous kindergarten teacher breaks down in front of her class. An inept ex- boyfriend attempts suicide. Someone attends a funeral in order to reclaim a debt. And it’s all screamingly, distressingly funny.

To date, the only entity to treat Pulling with less tenderness than Kelly or Horgan is the BBC, which declined to recommission the show for a third series – an unusual decision for a show with very respectable ratings.

"We weren't going to flog it to death," says Kelly, who is editing an hour-long special, scheduled for broadcast next month and designed to draw Pullingto a close. "But it was a bit of a surprise."

He is equally surprised that anyone should doubt his fondness for these people.

“In many ways the whole thing is to some extent about our twenties, which we spent doing jobs that we hated and sleeping with people we shouldn’t have,” he says. “And drinking vast quantities of booze . . . So I do have affection for these characters, because there’s so much of us in them.”

HOW MUCH OF Kelly there is in Love and Money, which opens tonight at Dublin's Project Arts Centre in a new production from Hatch Theatre Company, is worrying to contemplate. A play that may set a new land speed record for turning a laugh into a gasp, it opens with an e-mail exchange between two dislocated new lovers – hesitant, warm and tender – and, with a trickle that becomes a torrent, delivers a stunning revelation.

Bold in form and unflinching in content, it is easily the most compelling piece of playwriting you will encounter about love in a time of conspicuous consumption, and it is as destabilising as any banking collapse. (An alternative title could have been “Toxic Debt”.)

“People see me as much harsher than I am,” says Kelly, whose disposition is much more easy-going than might be expected. (Horgan, a friend for 12 years, merrily described him as “an unsociable weirdo” from the winner’s podium of the British Comedy Awards last year. Kelly did not attend.)

“People think I spend my time strangling puppies or something,” he adds, laughing. “I’m actually quite optimistic. I always think my plays are incredibly optimistic. Sometimes irresponsibly optimistic.”

And while he may have tremendous affection for his characters, “that doesn’t stop me from putting them into some terrible situations”.

Take Debris, "the first play that I really own up to", which opens with a drunken father literally crucifying himself in his living room as his son comes home (a "product of Kelly's deliciously warped mind", according to Guardianreviewer Lyn Gardner). Or Osama the Hero, a "war on terror" satire, in which several residents of a violent housing estate kidnap and torture an al-Qaeda sympathiser (revealing "a talent to disturb", according to Michael Billington, also of the Guardian).

Or Taking Care of Baby, a docudrama about an infanticidal mother which emerged at the apex of the verbatim theatre fad and claimed to be "taken word for word from interviews and correspondences" but was in fact entirely made up ("ethically, the play is on thin ice", according to Dennis Kelly himself).

If Kelly is currently one of the most interesting voices in British drama, it is because few of his plays are alike in style, all of them are alert to the times we live in and are written with a formal adventurousness, and each feels like a fresh shock to the system.

Born to Irish parents in London, Kelly grew up on a council estate.

“I haven’t had a terrible life,” he says. “We were quite poor where we lived, but I’m not a deprived child or anything like that.”

HE LEFT SCHOOL at the age of 15 and worked in a series of tedious jobs – an office, a gallery, a gift shop – while steadily developing a problem with alcohol.

“I haven’t had a drink in seven years now,” he says. “That sort of informs a lot of my work. When you become addicted to something, life becomes very dark. It does become very bleak. I think going through that, and coming out of it, and beginning to put things back together is in most of what I’ve written. But I’ve also been writing about strange times. I’ve been writing from 2003 until now, and the world is such a crazy place. My early plays were focused on things like the ‘war on terror’. I think it was because I was so shocked by it, and the stupidity of what was happening at the time. But it’s hard to write about those things without getting slightly dark.”

Kelly attended Goldsmiths College as a mature student and studied drama and theatre arts, a course geared more towards performance art than traditional playwriting. “They don’t really like writers, funnily enough,” he says. “In a way, it was a good thing because it meant I wasn’t being taught to write.”

Still, it’s hard to keep certain names at bay when reading or watching Kelly’s work. He admits that Caryl Churchill is a big influence, although he has not read her “sexy greedy” financial satire, Serious Money, to which Love and Money looks a natural successor. The unsettling atmosphere of Harold Pinter occasionally drifts in, as do the polemics of Edward Bond and the formal fragmentation of Martin Crimp.

Kelly came to playwriting relatively late – now 39, he wasn’t produced until the ripe old age of 30 – and, as he explains it, his professional desire is to merge the more daring aesthetics of theatre with the social engagement of its heritage.

“I started writing in the early part of this decade,” he says. “What I felt frustrated about – particularly in British theatre – was that all I saw was social realism. It wasn’t what I was interested in.”

Playwrights had abandoned the exciting departures in form made by Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill in the 1990s, Kelly felt, but had proved no more willing to take on bigger themes.

“Life had changed. We’d had September 11th. I think what needed to happen was that we needed to learn the lesson of those exciting playwrights, and at the same time, marry it up with the things we needed to talk about at this time,” he says.

Anyone who writes a falsified docudrama may seem a bit too sly to be taken at his word. But Kelly resists any suggestion that his heart’s not in it.

"What I wanted to write about with Taking Care of Babywas truth," he tells me. And like Jonathan Swift, who smuggled his deep humanism into razor-sharp satire, Kelly wants to shock with a purpose.

“It’s not something that I like,” he says of shock tactics. “I’ve no desire to provoke. But as an audience member I do like to be provoked into thought, I like to be provoked into feeling.”

He also bridles against the charge of irony. “It means that we can say things without genuinely believing in them,” he says. “I hate that.”

PLAYWRIGHTS HAVE rarely found much good to say about commerce, capitalism, materialism or designer handbags, and in Love and Money, Kelly proves no exception. It may distend the details of the recognisable world to unnerving extremes, but it offers a probing view of how people are ground down, corrupted and even dehumanised by the pursuit of capital. In the three years since the play first opened, that has become an easy story to sell. But Kelly sees something deeper in the play.

“There can sometimes be a very mechanical view of humanity,” says Kelly. “Personally, I feel the play is really about belief. Belief, to me, is a sort of fleshy thing. It may be flawed or wrong, but it’s human. Love is something human caught up in this machine that we sometimes feel our society has become.”

The word “credit” comes from the Latin for “believe”, and in a world of fiscal crunches, crises and collapses, both are in short supply at the moment. Kelly doesn’t claim any prescience for anatomising the consequences of greed, and some are bound to see a play about shopping, avarice and debt as a period drama about the day before yesterday, but the more remarkable thing about his play is that it finishes, not for the first time, with a meditation on life, the universe and everything.

“We don’t really think outside our time,” says Kelly, as the editing suite beckons. “It’s amazing. The world is just mental when you look at it. Subatomic particles are mad. And all of that information is completely useless to us as individuals. But, at the same time, that stuff helps us through our lives, in a way.”

Any play that seeks to lead us from shocking revelations through spiralling debts towards a universal truth demands to be seen. The question is: would you credit it?

Hatch Theatre Company’s production of Love and Moneyopens tonight and runs until May 9 at Project Arts Centre, Dublin. An hour-long special episode of Pulling will be broadcast next month on BBC3