Extraordinary Joe and his cast of plain men

Gangsters are glam, but Joe Penhall prefers to write plays about ordinary, flawed males.

Joe Penhall's plays are more concerned with men than women. But in a year when the media has been fawning over men who are "just gay enough", it's a relief to find a writer interested in ordinary, flawed specimens.

Joe Penhall's plays are more concerned with men than women. But in a year when the media has been fawning over men who are "just gay enough", it's a relief to find a writer interested in ordinary, flawed specimens.

When Blue/Orange opened at the National Theatre last spring, Penhall became one of our hottest young playwrights. A scorching and painfully funny analysis of why Britain is driving young black men mad, it confirmed Penhall's fascination with issues of identity and psychiatric illness. Tomorrow, the Edinburgh International Film Festival is premiering a new film of his first play, Some Voices (which effectively put schizophrenia on the map) starring David Morrissey, Daniel Craig and Kelly MacDonald. And Penhall is currently adapting Jake Arnott's hit novel The Long Firm for TV.

Penhall wrote Some Voices when he was 25 in response to mental health legislation introduced by the then minister, Virginia Bottomley. A young schizophrenic man is released into the care of his older brother, falls in love and stops taking his medication. For Penhall, the story has a personal resonance. "The protagonist, Ray, is based on a gifted musician friend who I'd always imagined had gone mad under the weight of his own genius, drink, wild women ... His Tourette's-like outburst had struck me as an inspired and honest response to the world around us. When I found out years later he actually had schizophrenia, I was haunted and abashed."

Staged at the Royal Court in 1994, Some Voices won the John Whiting award. It has also been something of an albatross around Penhall's neck. Until Blue/Orange, there was a sense he'd never quite lived up to its promise. Other reviewers saw it differently, however, regarding his move towards more cerebral, relationship-based plays ( Love and Understanding, The Bullet) as a sign of emotional maturity. "I wanted articulate, witty characters for a change. I was tired of easily identifiable drama about madness and death," he said in 1998.

It's unfortunate then, that the success of Blue/Orange has brought Penhall the title of "Mr Schizophrenia", or "the laureate of lithium" as one reviewer put it. "I find it bizarre," he says. "If there's a psychopath, a deviant, a sub-human knucklehead character, someone comes to me to write it."

The new film of Some Voices may encourage this view. The film opens with Ray (Craig) leaving hospital 28 days after being sectioned (which is the point at which Blue/Orange ends). It also asks many of the same questions: what is disturbed behaviour, and what is simply a rational response to life's chaos? When does the obsessive quality of love step over into a psychotic state? And how do carers cope?

In fact, the film is very different in tone and style from Blue/Orange. Directed by Simon Cellan Jones, who made Our Friends In the North, it's a raw, poetic take on love and London. Shot on 35mm film, it has the same swirling, improvised quality as Michael Winterbottom's Wonderland. It's also a minor triumph to find a new British film that's not about gangsters and pop stars.

Filmed in Shepherd's Bush, Some Voices looks set to be the antidote to the trustafarians of West London. Penhall is too loyal to knock Notting Hill (after all, Roger Michell also directed Blue/Orange) but he saw the need for a new take. "It's almost a mundane cliché to talk about Shepherd's Bush as multicultural, but there's a real egalitarianism around." Home to Steptoe and Son, the BBC, cult band Bush and one of London's top fringe theatre's - Shepherd's Bush may become an unlikely media star. "It's never been characterised in the way the East End has, with its gangster mythology. North London is High Fidelity, south London's always been a bit hard and intimidating, but Shepherd's Bush has escaped classification." For Penhall, the film also offered a chance to refine his script.

"I wrote Some Voices in 1994 before everyone started writing violent, Tarantino-esque plays," he says. "It was an achievement in itself but, looking back six years later, the thing I was most proud of - it's gothic, bloodcurdling nastiness - seemed unworkable and a bit boring." Gone is the heavy-handed treatment of domestic violence and insanity. In its place is a more naturalistic treatment of illness. Penhall saw film as the perfect medium to look at schizophrenia. He and Cellan Jones worked hard at creating a visual language that conveys the psychological horror of hallucinatory illness. Taking the spiral as a leitmotif, the film is full of subtle images of crop circles, pizzas, tablets, mobiles and tin cans. What does remain from the original play is a touching love story - but it's the love between the two brothers (superbly played by Morrissey and Craig) that is more important than their fleeting relationships with women. It's a recurrent theme in Penhall's plays - the pairing of a straight man and a misfit.

Some Voices famously ends with the brothers making an omelette - it's a device Penhall "borrowed" from Sam Shepard's True West where one of the characters makes 25 pieces of toast. "Making something on stage is incredibly compelling," he explains. Ironically, Penhall nearly didn't include the scene in Blue/Orange where Christopher peels an orange on stage. "Roger said to me, 'You're mad, you're going to rob the audience of an essential theatrical moment.' And of course, the first time we rehearsed it, it was quite special. Just watching somebody do something ... they don't have to be fornicating all the time."

With Some Voices, Penhall believes he's tapped into a genre British audiences are relatively unfamiliar with. "To my tremendous good fortune, it hasn't really caught on in this country. The buddy play isn't a dynamic people tend to write about. And I think it's a great, important theme. Your relationship with your brother is really a metaphor for your relationship with other men - and it manifests itself in your relationship with women, too." So are Penhall's male characters confused romantics? "They're quite psychologically feminine blokes," he agrees. "I'm not very confident about compartmentalising or polarising the genders. But they don't even understand women half the time. They're not pursuing money or power or pussy - what they're trying to grab hold of is something that's quite small and delicate, almost existential. I think a lot of men are far more sensitive and perverse and individual than they'd like to admit. And there's that terrible male paranoia that the bloke next to you is having more fun."

Women in Penhall's plays are deliberately on the margins. From Nicky the absent girlfriend in Love and Understanding to the fondue-making girlfriend in Blue/Orange. During rehearsals of the latter, Andrew Lincoln and Bill Nighy apparently argued about whether the girl was called Alison or Angela "because Bill said all the Angelas he knew were complete goers". Not that Penhall is a misogynist writer. He's sympathetic to the problems of women writing for the theatre today. "In Britain, we love our white middle-class males, our Tom Stoppards and Cambridge boys. The women who've become successful in my era have, to a certain extent, played the boys' game and beaten them at it, very cleverly and often quite beautifully. But it's a tiring campaign."

Penhall's heroes are resolutely male, however: Raymond Carver, Chekhov and Sam Shepard. He's clearly avoided the Shopping and Fucking route - but doesn't see himself as an iconoclast. "I do feel part of a gang - but it's a gang of individuals. Conor Macpherson's doing something different to Martin McDonagh, who's doing something very different to me. But we all like each other's work. Patrick Marber loves the same plays as me, even the same bits of the same plays, but we're quite different writers."

It's little wonder that Penhall seems older than his 32 years. He worked as a journalist, musician, chef and carer before his first play was accepted. "I naively imagined that you had to experience everything you intended writing about." When I tell him there was a rumour that he once worked at the Maudsley psychiatric hospital, he laughs and says he overheard two people at Blue/Orange arguing over whether he'd been a psychiatrist or a patient. The confusion is understandable - Blue/Orange nails the jargon of a failing NHS so brilliantly you feel it must be the work of an insider.

Surprisingly, he intended it as his last ever play. "It took me about three weeks [to write]. I honestly thought it was my uncompromising self-indulgence before I went out in a blaze of glory and wound up in the TV graveyard."

In the past, Penhall has been one of the few playwrights not to write about homoerotic violence. But he's about to break the mould - adapting Jake Arnott's crime novel. "The central character is a manic depressive gay gangster. But what it's really about is the way that we fetishise violence - when in fact it's a business." And he has little time for the myth of the gangster as existential outsider: "They're about the most dreary, self-obsessed bunch of knuckleheads that you can ever meet. Culturally they're the white van drivers."

Penhall seems unmoved by the trappings of fame, preferring to use his clout to promote Some Voices, which took over five years to make. "It was bloody hard. No one wanted to touch it. Film-makers in this country really do want Natural Nylon. They want Jude and Sadie racing about in the latest clobber pretending to be gangsters. They just want pin-ups with shooters." And he's frustrated that the industry persists in seeing Some Voices as a little film. "We're the Steptoe and Son of PR," he grimaces. "If I stood in the foyer of the Cottesloe with a placard saying, 'If you liked Blue/Orange, come and see my film', we'd sell out the Curzon Soho every night." It's a lovely thought.

'Some Voices' (15): EIFF (0131 623 8030), Cameo 1, tomorrow, Cameo 2, Tues; opens Friday in selected cinemas nationwide