In March 1996 a young man took London by storm when his first play, The Beauty Queen Of Leenane, opened at the Royal Court. Martin McDonagh was an enigma, Irish in name and parentage but in all other respects a Londoner.
His play was a black comedy that owed nothing to contemporary fashion and everything to old-fashioned strengths of narrative and plot, fused with an extraordinary grasp of stagecraft for someone who, it was said, had garnered his knowledge of dramatic construction from television soaps.
The Beauty Queen Of Leenane turned out to be one of four plays the near prodigy already had under his belt, two set in Ireland, two not. The irony is not lost on McDonagh. "If either of the other two had come out first, I probably wouldn't have been seen as an Irish playwright at all."
But while The Pillar Man and Dead Days At Coney have yet to be staged, the other Irish play - The Lieutenant Of Inishmore - opens today at The Other Place studio in Stratford-upon-Avon.
Described by the Royal Shakespeare Company as "a wicked black comedy on the taboo subjects of Irish paramilitaries, extreme violence, guns and cats", it is set to raise hackles.
We meet at the RSC's London rehearsal rooms. A notice pinned to the door warns visitors there's a cat in the building. In film terms, Wee Thomas, as the cat is called, would be called the McGuffin, the thing that kick-starts the action.
McDonagh describes himself as "an anarchist, in an anti-violence way". The anarchic streak extends way beyond politics, and McDonagh delights in pushing actors, technicians and directors to the edge of the possible.
"I always wanted to involve something live, for the thrill of seeing what the actors would do, how they would improvise around it," he explains.
"Unfortunately we haven't had enough time to try that yet, because the cats were crap. We've had to fire two cats up to this point. They just weren't working out. We had to call their agents."
McDonagh milks the joke and laughs an easy I-know-I've-got-it kind of laugh. Short grey-white hair, sharp suit, piercing blue eyes, endearing gap in teeth: male model going on gangster look-alike.
Gangsters rather than paramilitaries originally formed the pivot of the play.
"I wanted a very dangerous story and heights of violence: characters in peril make good storytelling. On the first day of writing I just had the possible cat plot - a dead cat belongs to a really vicious man - but then I was thinking: violence, INLA, let's open the story up - and it went to the place it did.
"Before the first day of writing, I had never thought I would write a political play."
The time is 1993, the year before the play was written. "I wrote it before the whole splinter issue came out. I wish it had been done that long ago; it could have foreseen some of the things that are happening now.
"But I think it has relevance now as well, because it will look like it's a play written directly about the Continuity or the Real IRA."
It is unlikely a play as unequivocal as The Lieutenant of Inishmore could have been staged before the peace process had reached some sort of equilibrium. Even so, the Royal National Theatre in London, which staged The Cripple of Inishmaan, the first play in the Aran trilogy, declined to take it on.
"The National refused to do it for political reasons." McDonagh's easy smile flicks off. "I can't quite accept the whole political question that the play's too dangerous to be done. The point of writing it was to be dangerous, so not to do it for those reasons smacked of crass stupidity and gutlessness."
He had the same response from the Royal Court. "Just as gutless. I would have thought it would have been up their alley, the hip young theatre that they're supposed to be. We tried continually for the last four years.
"We could have done it at a smaller place; the Tricycle in Kilburn said yes to it a while ago. But it is quite an expensive show: guns, bodies and so on. It's a good play anyway, a good story. It pushes the boundaries of violence and animal exploitation quite far."
This is said without irony. The power of McDonagh's writing lies in his ability to juxtapose the mundane with the macabre, and in The Lieutenant Of Inishmore the banality of violence allows McDonagh's anarchic humour full rein.
As an Irish Catholic growing up in south London, McDonagh's response to the violence in Northern Ireland was complicated.
"Like most southern Irish people, the community I grew up in were republican-leaning Catholics. Although there was anger when anyone, Protestant or Catholic, got killed up north, the innocent Catholic getting murdered would be even worse than a Protestant."
In The Lieutenant Of Inishmore, McDonagh attacks the "ludicrousness" of those beliefs head on.
"Attacking my own side was, I believe, the most interesting aspect. I do think if art can change anything about that situation, then anyone brought up Catholic and republican should be looking at their own side, and the opposite side should be doing the same. As long we keep attacking each other's communities artistically nothing's going to change.
"I have tried to be as vicious or as attacking as the groups on both sides have been over the last 25 years, but have no one get injured for it. To do something creatively that was almost as vicious or as explosive as what they have been doing in a non-creative way."
The Aran trilogy, of which this is the second play to be staged but the first to be written, came about through the chance that McDonagh's pinball creativity seems to generate. For plot purposes, he needed "a place in Ireland that would take a long time to get to from Belfast". Inishmore fitted the bill. Three Aran islands prompted the idea of a trilogy.
McDonagh's plots develop along similarly free-wheeling lines. He starts with an idea, then runs with it, not knowing exactly where it will take him. Rewrites are rare.
"I think storytelling is the biggest feature of all my plays. I wouldn't have characters just talking to each other. I like an audience wondering what's going to happen next. I like wondering what's going to happen next myself as I write. There's something thrilling about it."
When writing, he sees himself as the most critical member of the audience. "If you're not shocked or surprised by something, then it doesn't work."
Although the global success of The Beauty Queen Of Leenane - 39 countries, 27 languages, goodness knows how many awards - began in London, McDonagh finds English audiences the least satisfactory.
"I find there some kind of inverse racism. It's like in Ireland, I don't think anybody thinks I'm taking the piss. I'm taken as being Irish; half-Irish, half-English diaspora; whatever. In England it's like I'm completely taking the piss out of Ireland as a Londoner, an English person."
Indeed, McDonagh is dismissive of contemporary English theatre in general. Not that he goes very much, he says.
"Most of it is still pretty boring. You know that feeling you get, like you've just sat down and, 10 seconds in, you know what's coming for the next two or four hours?" In the circle of boring playwrights he singles out David Hare - "don't go down that evil path" - while Frank McGuinness comes in for a particularly colourful McDonagh tongue-lashing.
Other Irish playwrights fare better; Conor McPherson, Mark O'Rowe and Marina Carr all come in for praise. He likes to keep an eye, he explains, "on the pretenders to the throne". "Only kidding," he grins.
Returning to his own most Irish of plays, is McDonagh not afraid of personal reprisals? "I think I should be, but I'm not." He makes a face somewhere between wonder and fear.
"I believe in being as tough an artist as you can be. That's all you can do. If you have to be martyred for that, then you have to be." He crosses his fingers.
"At the time I was writing it, telling my friends about it, I was aiming to be the Irish Salman Rushdie. And he's still alive. But I think the Muslims have a bigger organisation."
The Lieutenant of Inishmore is previewing at The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon, (bookings on 00 44 1789 403403). The opening night is to be confirmed.