Penelope Skinner: 'It might look like I'm watching telly, but it's all work'

The award-winning playwright takes a funny route to the serious stuff
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Penelope Skinner the Royal Court theatre in London, where her play The Village Bike is being staged. Photograph: Antonio Olmos for the Observer

When Penelope Skinner wrote her first play, in 2008, for the Old Red Lion theatre in north London, she had trouble coming up with a title. Eventually, she decided to call it Fucked. Though not wholly inappropriate for a piece about lap-dancing, prostitution and a woman's mental decline, the title was, she explains, partly a joke. "That was what you'd call it if it was going to be on at the Royal Court."

  1. The Village Bike
  2. The Royal Court,
  3. London
  1. Starts 24 June 2011
  2. Until 30 July 2011

The revered London theatre, famous for staging taboo-busting work by young authors, such as Sarah Kane's Blasted, was where Skinner wanted to be. "For a long time, I really wanted the Royal Court to say yes to one of my plays and they didn't. Then I stopped needing them to say yes and maybe that's when they did."

After the success of Fucked, which transferred to the Edinburgh fringe, and Eigengrau at the Bush theatre in west London, Skinner has not only been commissioned to write a play by the Royal Court, she has also just won the theatre's George Devine award for most promising playwright based on the script she turned in.

When we meet in the Royal Court cafe, she's just been sitting in on rehearsals for The Village Bike, which opens later this month with Nicholas Burns and Romola Garai in the leads.

"The central character is a teacher who has moved to a village from London with her husband. She's going to have a baby so there's change in the air. She decides to buy a bicycle. That's where it begins. It's about sexual power, identity and what role you play within a relationship and how much power you think you have." She laughs. "Or that's what I hope it's about."

Like her characters, Skinner, who is 33, talks in short bursts. Like her plays, which offset awfulness with humour, she is very funny. When I ask about her writing day, she tells me she does a lot of thinking. "It might look like watching telly, but really it's all work."

Is humour always going to be integral to her writing? "Yeah, I suppose. Inside, I wish that I was like Sarah Kane, but it doesn't really come out that way. My dream is that I'll write something terribly serious and people will be like, 'It's so poetic!', but… " She laughs again. "That probably won't happen."

Her next play will be "set in a motorway diner and is inspired by films about waitresses in America. If I could be anything else, I'd be a waitress in an American diner."

In the meantime, she'll have to be satisfied with the Royal Court cafe.

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