In and out of the echelons

`Did you read the play?" They're almost the first words out of Mark O'Rowe's mouth when I meet him. He has made it a stipulation that he won't talk to journalists about his new play, Made in China, unless they have been given the script. Discussing the work is clearly what O'Rowe is interested in. What he's not interested in is talking about any group or area which he might be seen to represent, any classification that might be applied to him. "I'm from Tallaght, I lived there for 26 years of my life, and my parents still live there," says O'Rowe, "but I don't understand it when people call me a Tallaght writer. I don't try to represent the area. I don't really know what that means." Nor does he have a lot of time for discussions that would group him with other young male Irish or Anglo-Irish writers such as Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson or Enda Walsh. It's not that he minds the company - he says that he admires all of their work - he just wonders what would happen if his next play wasn't as good as the one before: "Would I get taken off the list?"

What does concern him is "writing a good story, a different story, and getting better at what I do". And what, at the moment, is inducing in him a state that he chirpily names "abject terror" is the imminent Irish premiere of his new play, Made in China, at the Peacock. O'Rowe, who is 30, started writing plays about five years ago; he has written six in total. He describes his early works, which were produced by companies such as Tallaght Youth Theatre and Fishamble, as "learning experiences". It was only with Howie the Rookie, which premiered at London's Bush Theatre in 1999, that he feels he came into his stride. Howie the Rookie was a huge and ongoing success: it won numerous British awards, including the prestigious George Devine Award, toured to the Edinburgh Fringe and won the 1999 Irish Times/ESB Best New Play award after its run in several Dublin venues. It has now been translated into numerous languages and played in countries as diverse as Germany, Japan and Finland. It also became a minor off-Broadway sensation earlier this year when it opened at the East Village venue, PS122.

The New York Times's usually circumspect critic, Ben Brantley, hailed it as a "thrilling new play that gives you that priceless, delirious high that comes from hearing words made flesh". Howie may return to a larger off-Broadway theatre this autumn, still featuring its original Bush cast, Irish actors Aidan Kelly and Karl Shiels.

WHILE the two characters in Howie the Rookie never interact, it is structured as two subsequent monologues. Made in China is a more traditional, sequential, dialogue-driven play. "I wanted to do something more theatrical and physical than Howie," says O'Rowe. "I said, the next one isn't going to be a monologue. I sat down with certain ideas or devices - trousers being folded over a radiator, an umbrella being opened and shut - those active things were where it began."

Potential audience members can be assured that the action in Made in China gets rather more spectacular than laundry folding; it's the story of a power struggle in an exaggerated urban underworld ruled by a never-seen crime lord named Puppa cat. One of the play's three characters, Hughie, is trying to get out of the "echelons". Another, a thick-flunkie type called Paddy, desperately wants to get in. The third, a slick, scary guy named Kilby, is trying to control the hierarchy. There's a Tarantino-like feel to the play's combination of banal chit-chat - about knick-knacks, the weather, and bodily functions - with lashings of brutality, both offstage and on.

Violence is a central element in both Howie and Made in China, but O'Rowe says it's not a personal obsession, nor is he writing from his own experience. "I'm quite scared of violence, and I have a strong imagination about things that might happen to you. I think the plays are more about exploring situations you could never imagine yourself in," he says. O'Rowe says that, for him, the play is less about what people do to each other than who they're trying to be. It's "about image. It's about how we perceive ourselves, what attributes we have deliberately given ourselves to say something or hide something." As with Howie the Rookie, in Made in China, O'Rowe toys with our expectations about location. Although he has written the play in a recognisable Dublin dialect, he never refers directly to a real Dublin location. The characters' names and an ongoing gag about designer John Rocha are about the only definite Irish references to be found in the play.

"The world is slightly surreal, slightly heightened," explains O'Rowe. "I wanted everything to reflect that. The locations are in reality, - but slightly outside reality - the characters are the same, the language is the same."

It is O'Rowe's skill with language that is perhaps his defining feature as a writer. His dialogue is a highly rhythmic, dynamic combination of profane shorthand, improbably large words and brilliantly imagined "makey-uppy" placenames and character names, as in Hughie's riff from act one: "Puppacat's boundaries, yeah. Echelons don't go outside those, man, it's watch your fuckin' hoop. Treaty doesn't exist past the Bannerman Flush, so for future reference, occurs again, don't speak, don't look at him".

This production reunites O'Rowe with director Gerry Stembridge, who directed a reading of O'Rowe's first play, The Aspidistra Code, coincidentally on the Peacock stage. There's an almost filial quality to the way O'Rowe describes his relationship with Stembridge: "Gerry's a very protective force. Going into the Peacock, it's nice to have Gerry to put his arm around me, you know, to protect me and the play". You'd think that, with the success of Howie, O'Rowe would be relatively financially secure, but he says that's far from the case. "Last year was terrible; I was borrowing money all over the place." He wrote a screenplay "for the money", which is now being produced by Neil Jordan's company under the working title Intermission. Another Irish theatrical prodigy, John Crowley, will direct. It was partially financial need that led O'Rowe to sell the rights to Made in China to a German theatre, the Schauspielhaus Bochum, before they were bought in Ireland. The Bochum production, directed by Patrick Schlosser, opened several weeks ago to generally positive reviews. O'Rowe says he was never a "theatre person" growing up, and still doesn't really consider himself one, though he does like the community aspect of working in Dublin theatre: "Now I can't get through town without seeing someone I know". He tries to see as much theatre as he can, though he confesses to a lack of tolerance for "the more experimental things, the ones that are, like, if brilliant, still boring. "Being someone who grew up with movies rather than theatre, where plot and story and movement and character are all important, all necessary - when something doesn't have all of that, I don't know . . . "I love a good play, a good story. That's why you go."

Made in China previews tonight and opens at The Peacock tomorrow night at 8.15 p.m. Booking at 01-878 7222.