The scene is a Dublin pub on a sunny afternoon in early spring. Declan Hughes and I are sitting up at the bar, the way playwrights and journalists are meant to, thinking big thoughts, exchanging insights. But one thing we are resolutely not doing is talking about the past.
The 35-year-old founder member and former artistic director of Rough Magic theatre company engages passionately with the world around him and has an aversion to looking back. The preface to the recently published edition of four of Hughes's plays (Digging For Fire, New Morning, Halloween Night and Love And A Bottle) is a forthright statement of antipathy towards the fossilisation of culture in general, and of Irish history in particular.
Growing up in Dublin in the 1960s and 1970s, he writes, "you were tired of hearing about those who didn't learn from history being condemned to repeat it; you sometimes felt the opposite was true, that those who were obsessed by the past were doomed never to escape it, to replicate it endlessly, safe and numb within its deadly familiarity."
His new play, Twenty Grand, which opens at the Peacock this week, directed by Conall Morrison, is very much of the moment. Set among the crime gangs of Dublin, and bristling with references to Ecstasy factories, biker gangs in Bray and ATM fraud, it is a contemporary noir thriller, with salty, brutally comic dialogue and unflinching violence. This is the underside of Dublin in the boom time, with "cash lying around like leaves", and everyone wanting to taste the sweets of off-shore bank accounts and shortcuts to prosperity.
"Noir has always been an obsession of mine," says Hughes, whose first play, I Can't Get Started (1991) explored the real and fictional worlds of Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman. "Noir fiction is true to the politics of the world in which we live. It's a rich seam to be mined, that route from crime, through business into dominance.
"When I began to work on this play, I had an image of a crime lord summoning a young lieutenant, who turns up late. It becomes a status game, a struggle for the balance of power. The older man, Frank, is giving his kingdom away, and the younger, Dalton, wants to move up, to become in his words `the top man'. "
These characters' heightened street language - fluent, yet at times chronically inarticulate - echoes that of David Mamet, whose work Hughes admires, having directed a fine production of Speed-The-Plow in the Project a few years ago. Among other things, Twenty Grand is a study of male language and male communication. "They use the language of business and of ethics, but it's also very elastic: what they mean when they talk about `a good man' is nothing to do with conventional morality," Hughes says. "They are card players bidding with their language, enjoying playing the game well."
Couldn't the current popularity of the pulp fiction/noir genre, especially in cinema, be viewed as a glorified version of a children's game of cops and robbers, with its own set of conventions and limitations? "It is a stylised genre, yes, but it is not as conventional as you're suggesting. It's very much to do with reflecting what is going on politically and socially."
One of the issues Twenty Grand is reflecting is Dublin's current property bubble, which is mulled over by Frank, the sharp-suited, mafioso-style leader of the crime gang: "Everyone wants to be a landlord, that's the lesson the Brits taught us. How you know you're on top. When you own the ground other people walk on . . . Need to get into it soon, while there's still some left . . . Gas, isn't it, we f. . .d the Brits out for doin' to us what we're doin' to each other. That's just good business though."
The number of new apartments in the city being bought by investors is disgusting, according to Hughes. "A small number of people are getting very wealthy. It's impossible not to feel a kind of rage about that, if you have any decency. Yet there's a conspiracy of silence about this. If you talk about it, you seem begrudging. I suppose that's because of the disappearance of the Left. There's no-one to challenge the constant fumbling in the greasy till."
For the characters in Twenty Grand, everything is an opportunity to make a killing. They live in the moment. "For them there is no past, and there is something exhilarating about living in the present and future tense." And, while his response to it is very different to that of these ruthlessly amoral characters, it the sense of being on a threshold of great change that fires Declan Hughes also. "What's exciting is the idea of making yourself up - there's something extraordinarily potent about that notion, which brings an intensity to the theatre also. "Yes, you could say that I also choose to live in the present tense. But my plays are not just throwaway; they are both contemporary and mythic. They have certain deep-seated thematic concerns, I suppose to do with man's attempt to find out the truth.
"But I loathe the obsession with the past in Ireland. Post-1960 Ireland is what interests me, when the country opened for business, as it were. I'm really not a fan of old plays, and most of the work by contemporary playwrights about the past, I have found very unilluminating.
"What's interesting now is that there is so much new work for the stage. There's a lot more happening in theatre than when we [Lynne Parker, Siobhan Burke and Hughes] first started out in the mid-1980s with Rough Magic. The median age of audiences has come right down too - if not of critics," he grins.
His earlier plays, especially New Morning and Halloween Night, examine the sense of confusion and fissure experienced by the post-Vatican II generation, and the rapidity of the changes in Irish society. With friendships supplanting families as the significant networks, the loss of institutionalised religion and the touchstones of cultural nationalism, his characters are searching for something with which to replace the old certainties.
They are asking themselves "how do we live? Why are we not happy?" but are embarrassed by their own questions and their need for some kind of personal redemption. Therapy counterpoises religion and solipsism triumphs over engagement with the "real world".
But politics are still present, implicitly, especially in the two comedies of manners, Digging For Fire and Halloween Night, and the authentic animus of sexual politics pervades all of the plays. "I have been influenced by the 1970s British political writers - Brenton, Hare and Barker - but I tread carefully; I really object to being told things in the theatre."
Twenty Grand opens at the Peacock Theatre, Dublin, on Wednesday, February 25th.