Colour coded

Joe Penhall's dark play, Blue/Orange, coming to the Peacock, deals with race and mental health, but he's not a writer of issues plays, he tells Louise East

Halfway through Joe Penhall's 2000 play, Blue/Orange, a version of which opens tonight at the Peacock Theatre, Dublin, there is a moment of supreme irony. Faced with a chaotic young black man who claims his father is Idi Amin and oranges are blue, a smooth-talking hospital consultant argues against classifying him as schizophrenic:

Schizophrenia is a pariah. It isn't newsworthy. It isn't curable. It isn't heroin or ecstasy. It is not the preserve of rock stars and supermodels and hip young authors. It is not a topic of dinner conversation. Organised crime gets better press. They make movies about junkies and alcoholics and gangsters and men who drink too much, fall over and beat their woman until bubbles come out of her nose, but schizophrenia, my friend, is just not in the phone book.

While this statement may have rung true back when Blue/Orange first opened on the small stage of London's Royal National Theatre, the play's triumphal progress has rendered this particular rant anachronistic. Far from proving a pariah, Penhall's play garnered ecstatic reviews and capacity audiences, transferred to the West End, won every gong worth winning, was filmed by the BBC and provided fodder for many a dinner-party conversation.

It's not hard to see why. The hot potatoes juggled by Penhall's cast of three - patient, junior doctor and consultant - are those of race, power and class, rich seams in an age where migration between countries and between tiers of the pecking order are both frequent and problematic.

"Race is a very, very big issue for me. I believe strongly in, for want of a better word, multiculturalism and I really wanted a play that had everybody in it," says Penhall over coffee at a Middle Eastern restaurant just next to the rackety pile-'em-high market of London's Shepherd's Bush.

"I had a very peripatetic upbringing and in my immediate family I've got Canadian, South African, English and Scottish blood," he says. "We all, in my family, know what it's like to be told who you are culturally. We all know what it's like to be misfits and to struggle to fit in. That's my pet private subject."

Yet Blue/Orange (a play brought to the Abbey's Fiach MacConghail by young Dublin-based director Annabelle Comyn) is no soft-edged vision of what the world could be if only the peoples of the world would live in harmony. A biting portrayal of opportunism and ambition, it's a play which is frequently hilarious, albeit in grimly surreal fashion, and just as often deeply pessimistic,

"It's about semantics," says Penhall. "Specifically, it's about the way in which very educated people with a good grasp of language are able to dominate people who are disenfranchised, and uneducated. Robert [ the consultant] is particularly well-educated and eloquent. He's the one who can twist anything to win an argument, which in an era of spin struck me as the kind of dramatic truth it would be exciting to see."

Penhall concedes that his play may not be the most obvious rallying call for multiculturalism.

"The play does end on a very pessimistic note because I am pessimistic about institutions," he says. "It's there that things like race are used as a football, mental health is stigmatised and mendaciousness is generally rewarded. But I'm not pessimistic about communities. If you look at this community, you'll come across tolerant, happy people, getting on fine. I don't think England is as vanilla as it used to be and that's really important. It makes for an interesting place to live."

Born in England in 1967, Penhall emigrated to Australia at the age of five with his dentist father and physiotherapist mother. Despite studying English and history at university, a desire to be a painter saw him briefly attend art school in Australia before dropping out because his fellow students were "so bloody inarticulate".

London beckoned, and Penhall found himself in a shared house in Shepherd's Bush, plying his trade as a musician and, sometimes, news reporter. At the same time, he started to go to the theatre, taking in Peter Hall's revivals of Harold Pinter's classics and the works of Joe Orton.

"Suddenly, something in my brain caught fire," he says. "I loved them. Theatre is all about behaviour and conflict and those seemed to be the things which had always interested me in a work or family situation or in a relationship - people's behaviour and the conflict that goes on between them."

His first full-length play, Some Voices, was quickly picked up by director Stephen Daldry and performed at the Royal Court when Penhall was just 27. Contained within it were all the themes he would return to in plays such as Pale Horse, Love and Understanding and The Bullet: the immigrant community (in the case of Some Voices, a dispossessed Irish couple), a besieged medical profession and a chronic imbalance of power.

With his ear for the absurdities of language and a tendency towards quickfire, tumbling dialogue, early comparisons with David Mamet were inevitable, but over the years admiring comparisons have also been drawn between Penhall and Arthur Miller, Harold Pinter and Michael Frayn.

Surprisingly, though, it is the bard of the American midwest, Sam Shepard, who Penhall describes as his "favourite playwright". On the day we meet, Penhall is fresh from a meeting with Shepard in New York and is bullish about the truism that you should never meet your heroes.

"I've met all of mine, so I'm getting very good at it," he says. "I've got to know Tom Stoppard quite well and I've met Harold Pinter a few times. I'm totally selfish. I just want to pick their brains and get first-class advice."

So why Shepard? "I suppose I'm interested in him because he doesn't write issue plays and, at the moment, in Britain, the status quo is heavily loaded toward issue plays."

But surely Penhall himself writes issue plays? "You see, I really don't think I do," Penhall says. "It horrifies me that some people think I do, in fact it really bothers me. I get a lot of TV people ringing me up and saying write a play about social reformation or the social services, and I just think that's so unimaginative and dull. If you're interested in those sorts of things, read the paper."

A bit of probing reveals that what Penhall takes issue with is not the idea of a play's subject being news-driven ("I do always have an eye on the news because I'm interested in it, so inevitably the things I want to write about are things that are in the air"), but the process whereby a playwright (not naming any names, but he does roll his eyes when David Hare is mentioned) "picks an issue, researches it within an inch of its life and then upholsters it with a few characters. It's deathly dull".

The subtext to all this may be the artistically tricky patch from which Penhall is just emerging, and about which he is quite frank. "After Blue/Orange, I felt a tremendous responsibility to do something bigger and better," he says.

"It was seen as a very important play for the mental health community and a very important play for the migrant community, so for a while I had this terrible dread of letting them down. To be perfectly honest, I ran for my life."

For his next play, 2004's Dumb Show, Penhall steered clear of life-and-death issues and lowered his crosshairs on tabloid journalism. Writing it was not an easy process - "I messed around with it for two or three years, possibly to its detriment" - and although he professes himself happy with the result, he also describes it as "very different to all my other plays, very cynical. It was really about my involvement with the entertainment industry and showbusiness and what I thought about it all".

After the success of Blue/Orange, Hollywood came knocking. In 2000, he adapted his own Some Voices into a film, starring Daniel Craig and Kelly MacDonald, and in 2003 wrote acclaimed adaptations of Ian McEwan's Enduring Love for the screen and Jake Arnott's The Long Firm for television. Last year he directed, for the first time, a short he wrote himself, called The Undertaker. He describes the process as "delightful" and is working on a feature script for himself to direct, yet he still regards the film industry with a distinctly jaundiced eye.

"I get sent all this stuff which has got nothing to do with what I'm interested in, and I know they haven't read any of my work," he says. "I'm just there because I've done a couple quite successfully now and I'm fresh meat. When you write it, they always give it to someone else to rewrite anyway. It's a really weird process so I don't like to do it much."

Closer to home, he's writing a four-part drama for the BBC based on the true story of an unexplained murder in the African community of Shepherd's Bush, and another stage play is nearly finished, "or at least I think it is - you never know".

As a parting shot, I ask him how he achieves the intense dramatic energy which characterises all of his work, and he leans in confidingly.

"One of the interesting things I've discovered from meeting other playwrights, and they'll always deny this, is that the good ones talk and think like their best plays," he says. "This is true of Stoppard, Pinter, [ Edward] Albee and Shepard, and of my contemporaries too.

"So I think the simple answer is that I think like that and talk like that. What I like about plays is that they're all about words. Joe Orton had this fabulous notion of bombarding someone with a torrent of words and beating them into submission. I like that idea."

• Blue/Orange is at the Peacock Theatre, Dublin from June 20th to July 15th