Bedrock's new play aims to ask questions about how we live - and what makes a good night out. Peter Crawley meets the author

Not too long ago, Alex Johnston became disenchanted with the idea of writing plays. This, it seems safe to say, might have been something that could hamper his career as a playwright. He's not entirely sure how it happened, but his enthusiasm for theatre was certainly bruised by a dispiriting debate preceding the Government's capping of artists' tax exemptions.

"People like me, who earn so little money, were being told by the paper that we were spongers," he recalls. "So what was the point in doing this thing that was so disrespected?"

He had an idea for a play, however; one that would address the moral flux of living in contemporary Ireland, but he began to drag his heels at the prospect of - as he puts it - "having to make up a story with a central conflict, that would be in some way emblematic" . . . The words trail behind him with a weary, recalcitrant emphasis, as though such fundamental theatrical ideas as plot, significance and, indeed, drama have become tiresome and unreasonable demands.

"Any play I've seen that's tried to do that, has just - in my personal opinion - failed horribly." Johnston's efforts to write himself out of his disillusionment have resulted in This is Not a Life, a piece for theatre which is not exactly anti-theatrical, hardly non-narrative and which mercifully doesn't quite raise the spectre of the "post-dramatic", but which does stray from the parameters of a conventional play.

Bedrock, the company for which Johnston has long served as literary manager, resident writer and frequent performer, has coined its own term for productions that blur the boundaries of conventional performance: it calls them "urban ghosts".

IN CONVERSATION, Johnston will frequently refer to "the way we live now", something that he suggests is the basis for many a contemporary play, but which nonetheless is a phenomenon that remains out of theatre's reach. This is Not a Life, written for four characters who in the text are referred to only as A,B,C and D, and who adopt their actors' names on stage (Kevin Healy, Caitríona Ní Mhurchú, Joe Roch and Megan Riordan), begins with a direct address to the audience. The performers welcome us to the theatre, congratulate us for our commitment to "what we're tryna do" and then introduce themselves by exhibiting objects of personal significance.

Naturally the significance evaporates ("Actually I didn't realise that the object was supposed to be symbolic. I thought we were just supposed to bring something we liked.") and their conversations begin to tumble with anecdotes and unspoken tensions before the performance seems to break down.

Before it does, however, somebody announces, "The old ways don't work any more. We're facing new challenges and it's time for a new approach." This, you surmise, is Johnston's.

"It was very hard to write," he admits. "We had 15 or 16 drafts trying to work out what worked and what didn't." Can he say what made it so difficult? "It was trying to write a piece of theatre that would work, about a situation of chaos and flux, and there aren't any big conflicts to hang it all on."

Actually there's a huge conflict at the centre of the play that Johnston has constructed, a friction generated when the two acts of the play begin to clash. After we have been introduced to the first act's form of direct address - one that asks us to suspend our suspension of disbelief - the second act returns with the conceit of stage naturalism, re-establishing the fourth wall for - of all things - a dinner party scene.

That the characters have recently come through an al-Qaeda style terrorist attack, in which a bomb has detonated at the centre of Dublin, seems to have shaken them only slightly from their concerns: the balance between privilege and guilt, morality and ethics, and the rather less abstract matter that two of them are having an affair.

It is, Johnston says, the culmination of a gradual shift in style, from the experimental to the more conventional, "from something that feels like the fire announcement's still going on," he explains, "to something which becomes more of a play".

It's tempting to overstate how radical This is Not a Life really is. After all, Johnston is hardly the first dramatist to break the frame of stage realism, or to play fast and loose with theatrical conventions. Playwrights have always experimented with form, to the extent that it's now quite difficult to find dramas that happily subscribe to those Aristotelian unities of place, time and action, or to identify many that fall in line with the neat formula of the so-called Well-Made Play.

Nor is this the first time Johnston has deviated from the boundaries of conservative stagecraft. "I've never been very tied to them in the first place," he agrees. "I suppose I was trained in my drama school [ Bull Alley] in a very audience-conscious way of performing, it certainly wasn't Stanislavski, it was sort of mach schau, like the Beatles in Hamburg. Our South African drama teacher [ Neville Carlisle-Style] used to say, when you're onstage, whatever you do, the audience will think you mean it - so don't do anything you don't mean."

This emphasis on conviction doesn't quite square with Johnston's seeming distrust of theatrical artifice. Since he first emerged in 1997 with Melonfarmer, his plays have been self-aware, self-critical, stewing in pop cultural and literary quotation. At times, when he speaks of This is Not a Life, it sounds less that he was determined to avoid the conventions of a play, than the conventions of an Alex Johnston play. He agrees that he has previously treated characters as ciphers for his own opinions, something he tried to limit this time around.

"I'm definitely not trying to push arguments or anything," he says. "The characters are full of arguments. But I'm not." Indeed, at one point in the play somebody announces, "Nobody needs a lecture on how shallow we all are," and Johnston is abhorrent that a play should sermonise. There is no moral to this story he insists, no lesson.

AFTER OUR INTERVIEW, he elaborated his concerns in an e-mail. "Especially in this particular moment," he wrote, "the Irish seem to want their artists to function as surrogate priests - sources of authority, fonts of wisdom, people who will offer us free-range organic consolation, you name it. It's not a position I feel comfortable with."

This is Not a Life, which takes its title from the inscription of René Magritte's surrealist painting The Treachery of Images, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" - and not from his cousin Jennifer's recent book This is Not a Novel - sets itself rather modest ambitions.

"What I really wanted to do was right something that felt a little bit about like the way we live now," he says. "Not to say anything about the way we live now but [ to create] something that was a little bit more experiential."

The experience, he insists, must be diverting before it can have any grander aspirations. "The older I've got, the more I feel if you are going to do a play about terrorism and the collapse of values it better be entertaining. Any ambition to diagnose the world is purely incidental. The least you can do is make people think that they've got more than they paid for."

As for Johnston, who considers a great play "anything that makes you feel better to be alive than not", the process of writing himself out of his disenchantment seems to have paid off.

If this play opens by trying to "break the audience's faith in the contract between them and the performers", it is something Johnston is determined to restore before the play's end.

"The characters' ideals collapse," he says, "but ours do not. They lose theirs, but we get ours back."

Likewise, Johnston seems to have had to break down his faith in theatre in order to build it back up again. "I think this play would reassure you that there is a point in going to the theatre," he concludes with scuffed optimism, even if he is not too concerned for the disillusionment of A,B,C and D. "But they're fictional characters," he observes, and the artifice dispels once more. "We shouldn't feel too sorry for them."

•This is Not a Life opens tonight at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin, and runs until Nov 18