Mark Ravenhill: The secret's out at Edinburgh

The latter, he says, was sparked by reading Sean Holmes’ tub-thumping manifesto for Secret Theatre, which labelled the traditional structures of British theatre "corrupting" to the work they are supposed to serve. This piqued Ravenhill’s interest.

"I went to see the [Secret Theatre] shows and really liked the youth and invention and freshness of what they were doing," he tells me by phone from the Lyric, "so I contacted Sean and said I'd really like to do something."

Handily, the opportunity for Secret Theatre to take two shows to Edinburgh then arose, and Holmes invited Ravenhill to write one of them. The result, Show 6, is billed as an 'explosive thriller', though Ravenhill admits this sounds "a little too Dan Brown" for his tastes.

The play was inspired by a passage in Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine about members of the Pinochet regime in Chile who adopted the children of their victims.

"It's a thriller in the way that something like Oedipus Rex is a thriller," the writer explains, "it's about somebody who starts to find out they're not who they think they are so they go on a journey to find the truth about who they are."

The fact Ravenhill's authorship was made public ahead of the production opening marks a shift in Secret Theatre's approach; previously, all details remained under wraps until the audience were in their seats.

"They realised that the 'secret' bit was such a strong thing that it rather overrode everything else," says Ravenhill. "It's actually the development of an ensemble company and the inventiveness of what they're doing that really lies at the heart of Secret Theatre."

He's quick to add that, initially, he liked the idea of his name remaining anonymous. I wonder if this is because people tend to come to his work with preconceptions?

"When we first did a reading of Sarah Kane's Crave for Paines Plough, it had been written under a pseudonym, because she was really keen to see what would happen if an audience came without preconceptions. At some stage I'd like to do something similar."

The mention of Kane prompts a (no doubt unnecessary) reminder that Ravenhill's breakthrough play was Shopping and Fucking in 1996, a sexually explicit parable on consumerism that placed him squarely alongside her as a leading member of the 'in-yer-face' generation of writers.

"In the mid 90s something exciting did emerge but we never set out to be a group, there was never a shared manifesto. It's human nature to look for patterns and to label things."

“We still have a ‘good Muslim/bad Muslim’ mentality”

We move to a discussion of Ravenhill's other play a the Fringe this year, Product, a monologue he first performed in 2005 that is being revived starring Olivia Poulet, best known for her work in TV comedy The Thick of It.