Anthony Neilson: Gut feelings

Anthony Neilson and fun-for-all-the-family Christmas cheer go together about as amicably as "The Val Doonican Songbook" and Irvine Welsh. Santa would be back up that chimney before you could say "pudendum" rather than sit through this dramatist's compulsive, pressure-cooker plays, which have treated us to such highlights as a woman defecating on stage and another with a sewn-up vagina; a squaddie crazed by the belief that he's been the butt of a torture group known (not for nothing) as "the Penetrators", and the mental recesses of the Düsseldorf Ripper, a real-life serial sex murderer from the Weimar Republic.

So, it's a pretty alternative form of festive spirit that we can expect from the two Neilson-authored events on offer this Yuletide. At the Riverside Studios, in west London, there's a seasonal revival of his comedy The Night Before Christmas, starring Patsy (Bianca from EastEnders) Palmer. And at the Royal Court, in south-west London, in his own main stage production, there's the premiere of The Lying Kind – a black farce, also set on Christmas Eve, which charts the spiralling chaos caused by two PC Plods when they can't bring themselves to inform an elderly couple that their daughter has been killed in a car crash on the long drive home. The character-type vital to this panic-propelled genre – the morbidly suspicious meddler – arrives in the formidable shape of a two-ton female vigilante, who is firmly convinced that the household is hiding a paedophile.

I met Neilson in a lunch-break during rehearsals. Talking in a public place about this playwright's work takes a certain amount of courage. The thought, say, of Trevor Howard's penis thrusting in and out of Celia Johnson (a scenario imagined as part of a hypothetic "uncut" version of Brief Encounter in his play The Censor) is not one you necessarily wish to share with fellow-diners. Still less, a discussion of that devastating moment in Stitching when the hero recalls his first boyhood orgasm, accidentally achieved while gazing at photographs of naked women in a book about Auschwitz. I dreaded being led to some quiet little restaurant. Mercifully, we fetched up instead in a large, rough pub where our conversation aroused not a flicker of curiosity among the surrounding pint-lifters.

Neilson is a burly, 35-year-old Scot and his talk is much as you would expect from the plays: unflinchingly forthright, flecked with unpredictable humour, and visionary in a thoughtful, humane way far removed from the tawdry obsessions of the mere sensation-monger. The current project, he reveals, has involved a big adjustment in his customary writing methods. "The way I like to work is very quickly – to go into the rehearsal room without a script and just kind of make it up. For some reason, when I do that, what emerges is very uncensored. I don't try to finesse it, or to put across a better image of who I am. It comes straight from the gut – with all the advantages and disadvantages that brings."

The Royal Court, however, demands a full text in advance. Whether this was a wise requirement with a dramatist such as Neilson (and with a form like farce in which the subconscious needs to explode through the membrane of respectability) remains to be seen. "The Lying Kind is very much a hommage to Laurel and Hardy and all the other stuff that I really like," he discloses. "It may be a big disappointment to people who are expecting something dark like Stitching." But when Neilson elaborates on the thematic core of the play, you can see the family resemblance to his more bruising works. "I wanted to write something about how much damage we do when we try to protect people from the truth. I have my own personal reasons – relationship issues – for being interested in that. But I also wanted to present a counter-argument – that there are some people you really shouldn't tell the truth to." Which is where the anti-paedophile fanatic weighs in.

Paternalistic overprotection and attempts, from on high, to expurgate experience outraged Neilson from an early age. When he was 10, living in Edinburgh, he embarked on a precocious correspondence with the British Board of Censors, demanding to know why certain films had been given a particular certificate. "I remember being really pissed off that I couldn't see the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers because it was an 'X'. I wrote to them pretty often..."

The position on censorship intimated in his own plays has, however, been widely misunderstood. Some commentators, for example, jumped to the unwarranted conclusion that he supported the desire for total license of his character, Miss Fontaine, the hardcore movie-maker in The Censor. Conversely, the critical reaction to Stitching – an emotionally shattering drama that was the hit of this year's Edinburgh Festival and earned him a nomination for an Evening Standard Award – gave the false impression that he was taking an illiberal line. The telling irony is that many of the play's champions got it badly wrong. This is its set-up. In the light of an accidental pregnancy, a faithless couple unstitch their troubled sexual history to see if there's a way forward. These scenes in the present tense are intercut by episodes that show the pair in a grisly prostitute-client relationship, enacting fantasies fuelled by extreme pornographic images downloaded from the internet.

We gradually realise that these are jumps forward in time. The couple ended up having the child, who died from neglect. The dangerous games are a form of desperate self-punishment, a regression back through their sexuality that culminates in a symbolic and horrifying restoration of the hymen. What was fascinating, though, was how many critics revealed their own prejudices by assuming that this must be a sequence of flashbacks. "It's odd that, isn't it?" says Neilson. "It was almost as if I'd written a reactionary play depicting a relationship that began as a commercial encounter, was seeded in fantasies, and so was bound to come to no good. But I would never write that kind of thing."

Neilson's work bears out his belief that it is possible "to be both subtle and visceral", a trick not pulled off by everyone in the in-yer- face school. In his survey of contemporary drama, The Full Room, the director Dominic Dromgoole rightly draws attention to the implied yearning for something beyond the present sickness, and to the achingly tender moments in the plays: "Neilson looks into the heart of our sexual darkness, and allows himself the brief dream of a better world. It's the mark of a truly moral writer."

So, why has he been denied the recognition that is his due? It may be partly a misconception about his true subject matter. "People say 'Oh, another play about sex. You keep writing about sex'. And I go, 'Well, that's like saying I keep writing about language'. My interest is always in sex as a means of expression between people, and what it is used to express is different in each play."

It may also, he thinks, have something to do with the fact that senior critics ("who are prepared to review The Play What I Wrote three times") rarely venture to tiny venues like the Finborough, where several of his pieces have been premiered. And they are happier writing about David Edgar-style discussion plays than the intense, unparaphrasable experiences Neilson provides.

Then again, there's the dramatist's own self-confessedly problematic relationship with institutions. Thrown out of school and college, he also boasts of being banned from Hampstead Theatre. There's talk, though, of his being commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company for the new regime under fellow-Scot, Michael Boyd. The author of Penetrator and the RSC? It sounds as unlikely a pairing as, well, Anthony Neilson and Christmas carols round the manger. But this is just the kind of imaginative infusion that the RSC needs – a rich, reviving booster jab of blood and sperm.

'The Night Before Christmas', Riverside Studios, London W6, to 30 Dec (020-8237 1111)

'The Lying Kind', Royal Court, Jerwood, London SW1, to 11 Jan (020-7565 5000)