‘The Westbury is more representative of my life than an alleyway strewn with needles’

People tend to get Mark Ravenhill all wrong. Since he first burst on to the scene in 1996, with a play whose title alone was enough to earn him instant notoriety, there has been an impression of him as a playwright provocateur. Not even early mainstream success, affiliation with institutions from the Royal National Theatre to the Royal Shakespeare Company, or a career marked by cerebral satire, classic adaptations, opera libretti and youth drama have completely dislodged the association of a "shock merchant". Photographers still put him against brick walls in pungent alleyways, crouching to take menacing shots of Ravenhill from below. "Which is not good for chins," he says.

Today, the playwright surveys the people taking afternoon tea at the Westbury Hotel, in Dublin, and says, “This would probably be more representative of my life than an alleyway strewn with needles.”

Such is the potent afterlife of what came to be known as in-yer-face theatre, a confrontational period of British drama in the 1990s that took Ravenhill, Sarah Kane and Anthony Neilson as its unholy trinity, and swelled to include Martin McDonagh, Patrick Marber and Jez Butterworth, among others.

Ravenhill had intended to stage his first full-length play, Shopping and Fucking , in a room above a pub for a group of friends. Instead he sent it to Max Stafford-Clark, the new-writing champion then at the Royal Court Theatre, where it became a succes de scandale. It later reached the West End, had innumerable translations and was regularly staged around the world.

When attention could be shifted from the title, which British law prohibited from appearing in full on posters and in other advertising, its subject matter hardly doused the flames. Depicting graphic sex, violence and vulgar materialism among drug addicts, dealers and sexually abused rent boys, all pointedly named after the members of the boy band Take That, Shopping and Fucking was full of wit and rage. (Although it savaged the play, a New York Observer review understood where the real obscenity in Ravenhill's world lay and asterisked the word s****ing.)

It's easy to become nostalgic for this era, a time when plays such as Kane's Blasted or Butterworth's Mojo also made scandalised headlines, and writers attracted notice, good and bad, through formal and political provocation. "There was a sense of the flood doors opening," Ravenhill says, "and a less fixed idea of what a play was supposed to be. There'd been a sort of common agreement about the social function of a play until then: that they were going to make us better. The 'theatre of clean fingernails' is what I call it."

Reading Ravenhill in the press, where he has been an outspoken and voluble presence as well as a columnist for the Guardian , he often describes British theatre now as similarly, dispiritingly cleanly. "When I started working in the theatre, in 1987, artistic directors used to programme plays, knowing they wouldn't find an audience, because they believed in them heart and soul. I haven't heard anyone say that for the past 10 or 15 years. Now the discussion is: 'Is this going to transfer to the West End?' "

Scourge of cosy thinking?
This has made Ravenhill seem like a scourge of cosy thinking and theatrical dead wood, pillorying safe choices from a secure position. His reputation as a polemicist precedes him, though. Last August the BBC reported his opening address at Edinburgh Festival Fringe under the headline "Ravenhill: Austerity 'could be good for arts' ", which subsequent reports construed as a call for the end of subsidy. That was quite a distortion of Ravenhill's sentiments, which instead used wicked humour and sobering logic to shake people out of complacency.

“One of the things that people in the theatre didn’t seem to be addressing is that there is a real possibility of the end of subsidy,” he says. “Its history is fairly short in Britain. It’s not science-fiction dystopia to think that actually the Tory government might say, ‘Do we need to give any money to the arts?’ I think there is a real taboo about saying that might happen in theatre. It just seemed to me to be a question we were evading.”

He expected his speech to be dismissed as a lefty rant, but he says the reporting of it made him “seem like the most rabidly right-wing champion of the free market”. He began trending as a hate figure on Twitter until the entire text of his speech went online. “Because of all this hoo-ha, 15,000 people read the whole text of the speech. Maybe it worked out for the best.”

A provocateur rarely has to supply answers or alternatives. Ravenhill is an incisive critic of stale mechanisms, for instance, pointing out that since the 1990s theatres have become “much more systematic in their writer-training programmes”, schooling emerging talents in “what a play should be”. This has led, he says, to a generation of playwrights groomed to keep the machine fed. “It’s putting the cart before the horse: you start to create writers to feed the system.” The consequence is that theatre loses its edge.

He has in his own career been remarkably successful at resisting categorisation, sometimes forcibly. Never interested in being labelled a gay playwright, he announced in 2007 that he would concentrate instead on writing for heterosexual characters (a pledge he broke in less than two years in his collaboration with Bette Bourne on A Life in Three Acts ).

He responds well to stimulating challenges: his 2005 monologue Product , a caustic satire on the media and the war on terror, was designed to be a show he could perform anywhere; in Ravenhill for Breakfast he wrote and produced a new 20-minute play each day during the 2007 Edinburgh Festival Fringe (it was later restaged as Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat ); and he has used classic plays to address contemporary concerns in a climate-change-wary version of Voltaire's Candide and Brecht's The Life of Galileo , which revived the age-old antagonisms between science, faith and politics.

Anti-establishment?
He's the first to concede, though, that he is at heart a traditionalist: his influences are David Mamet and Arthur Miller, Caryl Churchill and David Hare, and even Shopping and Fucking has a conventional narrative. "I've never thought of myself as an anti-establishment playwright. My first play was on in the Royal Court. Performance-art friends of mine at the time were cutting their bodies with razor blades, 'For one night only!' I always thought that what I was doing was on the conventional side of things. I've always tried to move in and out of the big institutions. But I wouldn't say that anything I've written is massively radical."

In Dublin, where he is a guest of Dublin Theatre Festival and Theatre Forum’s Next Stage programme, Ravenhill takes part in an obliging and forthright public interview and then facilitates a day-long playwriting masterclass. For a storied writer he makes himself uncommonly available. “The other option, which just doesn’t quite suit my personality, is that you just write the work and don’t say anything. In many ways that’s the best option. But I’m naturally quite a public, garrulous person.”

He is full of enthusiasm for wildly different projects, from an "audio adventure" episode of Doctor Who that he scripted to the spiritual dimension of the bleak cinema of Lars von Trier – "in terms of my image, not much of a mismatch". He is currently working on a new play, but not for commission, which tends to inhibit him. "No, I like to please people," he says, with a long liquid stress. He catches the discrepancy between this genial man and the renowned controversialist. "Yeah," he says, laughing. "I have a desperate need to be liked and to please. As well as some sort of pathological urge to provoke. Maybe it's two sides of the same coin."