"We all need stories, we make up stories so that we can get by. And I think a long time ago there were big stories. Stories so big you could live your whole life in them. The Powerful Hands of the Gods and Fate. The Journey to Englightenment. The March of Socialism. But they all died or the world grew up or grew senile or forgot them, so now we're all making up our own stories. Little stories." The central message of Mark Ravenhill's first play, Shopping And F**king, which opens at Andrew's Lane Theatre on Monday as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival Fringe, may be spelled out in capitals, but it still strikes a chord. What makes the play so distressing is not, however, the assertion that the great myths have died; it is the idea that there is still one alive and it is that of money. Julian McGowan's set is a luminous screen scored by neon words like "home", but the letters mutate into logos: an "H" straight from the Al Fayed empire, for instance. And against this, Lulu, Mark and Robbie create a desperate, fin-de-siecle ghost of a family, trying to find work, trying to have relationships, trying to share the little individual portions of food they zap in the microwave, but not standing a chance against the forces of the market. They are a void waiting to be filled.
One critic said you'd have to have "the mind of Robert Mapplethorpe and the stomach of a pathologist" to enjoy the play known in polite circles as Shop- ping, which has stormed the West End, and has packed them in from Stockholm to Tel Aviv. But Mark Ravenhill seems himself far from despair. Tall and thin, with intelligent blue eyes and a great smile, the 30-year-old has a shaved head and fashionably funky clothes, but would blend into any crowd of arty Dublin thirtysomethings. He has, inevitably, been compared to Irvine Welsh, but he identifies far less with his characters' experience than Welsh does; he describes it as "terrifying" that "lots of teenagers and people in their 20s swear blind they're just like them or their friends". Ravenhill made them up, inspired by Bruno Bettelheim, as figures in a fairy story: "You don't need to know where Hansel and Gretel went to school or how many pairs of socks they've got in the drawer."
Ravenhill's horror at his own creations betrays the biggest surprise of the play; despite its slightly naughty title and its West End success, it has the moral fibre of a Calvinist minister's sermon. It is political. Although the characters are not real, they are caricatures of what can happen to people in a world with no ethics other than those of the market: "The kind of mistakes some older critics have made is that they think these characters are an underclass. They're based on the kind of people I was at university with, who weren't as lucky as I was. Even with a degree, the dividing line between telephone sex operator and Western playwright is quite thin."
When asked if he thinks New Labour is going to change Britain, he says: "I would like to think so. But the danger is that those 17 years of Tory rule so cut people off from any act of concern about politics that people stopped caring about politics, and believing that politics could alter their lives - by now who is in power doesn't make any difference. It will take a long time before they're made to feel they have a voice. That will maybe take a generation to happen."
Although the world inhabited by Ravenhill's characters is a made-up one, it reflects elements of Hayward's Heath, the sleepy, dormitory English town where the writer grew up: "There was something pretty weird about Hayward's Heath," he says. "It was one of the soulless new town-type places and my brother told me recently that it's the only place in England where they won't keep the 7-Eleven shop open 24 hours because it's too dangerous. They couldn't even manage after bringing a manager down from Brixton."
But Ravenhill had a safe vantage point from which to observe alienation: a family background. He is close to his parents, a draughtsman and a typist, and although he advised them not to come to the play, they are extremely proud of him. Ravenhill's characters, like those in other fin-de-siecle works like Trainspotting and Enda Walsh's Disco Pigs (which Ravenhill greatly admires) have no parents, or else parents who do not count: "Of course. We still . . . you know. Christmas. We spend Christmas together. On the whole," trails off Lulu.
From Ravenhill's relative safety, he has written a cautionary tale about people who are not like him - you could construct a moral code from it on the basis of "Avoid everything these characters do: Do not eat microwaved easi-dinners. Do not lose touch with your family. Do not sell your soul to the god of money. Do not give up on personal relationships."
The last two points could not be more graphically made in Shopping And F**king. Abandoned by Mark, Robbie (Mark's boyfriend) and Lulu (Robbie's ex-girlfriend) decide they need gainful employment, but the best situation they can find is one selling E at a nightclub. When Robbie, high himself, gives away all the E they have, they are suddenly £3,000 down to the Devil himself, a gangster in a suit, who tends to go for people with a Black and Decker if they botch jobs. He has a video to prove it.
Meanwhile Mark is making headway on the relationship front. He has been told by his counsellors on a drug dependency course that attachments to people are a form of addiction: "I did drama workshops at a drugs rehabilitation centre, and they were being told this dependency and co-dependency thing - you must avoid relationships with people - a rather bleak solution to having a drugs problem. I was kind of horrified by that," explains Ravenhill. (A gay, single man himself, I asked him about a quote in an interview: "Relationships can feel just like having another job", and he responds quickly: "I work very hard and I actually quite like coming home at the end of the day and having time on my own. That's just what works for me, I'm not recommending it for other people.")
SO what does our character do, now he is warned off relationships? Gets himself a rent boy. And falls in love with him. But this particular rent boy has been so destroyed by being penetrated with kitchen knives by his step-father, that the love may as well die in embryo. When Robbie and Lulu need his money, and Mark needs to hear the words "I love you", they give him the only form of sex he understands. They have to visit the kitchen drawer. However, the works of fiction which we quote as being true to our society - including This Life, of which Ravenhill is now writing a "top secret" third series - are by definition written by people who are not trapped by that society, and in Ravenhill's case, can even moralise about it. I tell him things can't be so bad if he's as happy as he seems. But he refuses to offer his characters any hope.
He returns to his theme: "We are living in strange times. For most people in most times, your part was part of a big story. This is probably quite a rare moment in history, when you don't see your personal actions as part of a big story. You make sense of yourself not as part of a big story. Everything is down to individual choice. It's a different way for people to live.
"It's such early times, there doesn't seem to be a realistic set of alternative values," he says. "I can't realistically give my characters a set of alternative values. Everything's down to very small, very concrete moral choices. And it seems the time is a long way off before things will get better. It's like that bit in Chekhov's Three Sisters when they say things might get better in 1,000 years. In the 1970s, people thought things would get better overnight."
Shopping And F**king, presented by Out of Joint and Royal Court Theatre, is at Andrews Lane Theatre, Dublin, from September 22nd to October 4th.