Making men squirm

Boy Gets Girl is a play about stalking. It includes a male character who "'fesses up that he's not above looking at a woman and wondering whether he wants to have sex with her". And he's the nice guy in the piece. No wonder there's been a collective shifting of discomfited male buttocks on the Royal Court's leather seats as the men in the audience realise that the secret's out.

So picture my own trepidation as I shook hands with the woman who put these sentiments into words. Is she going to think I'm thinking that? Who's to say I won't be? Maybe this is why Rebecca Gilman, a dry wit in her mid- to late thirties, spends an inordinate amount of the interview laughing her head off, and not at my jokes. "My original director," she explains, "suggested to me that usually with men and women, at some point men are saying, 'I want to **** her'. I think it's true with women, too. But with men it can have more violent, predatory overtones."

Gilman, who hails from Alabama but lives in Ohio, has been adopted by the Court. This is her third play to be staged there, and her second this year. For The Glory of Living she won the Evening Standard's Most Promising Playwright award in 1999. It was a wildly demotic piece about a trailertrash teenager who amorally abets her murderous husband. She followed it with Spinning into Butter, a more discursive look at racism on an American campus. And now stalking.

Theresa (played by Katrin Cartlidge) is a magazine journalist in New York who goes on a blind date; events pile up until the police finally recommend she move home and change identity.

Stalking has been around a lot longer than the word. Gilman cites Bradley Headstone, of Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, as the first fictional stalker. But according to a forensic psychologist who attended an early rehearsal, its recent growth is due to the increasing mobility of a workforce who find it harder to make deep connections. Gilman got the idea for the play from a piece in the New York Times. But she noticed the phenomenon for herself when working as a secretary. "I sat at a desk across from an office that was eight feet away. For a year I heard everything that went on with the two guys that shared that office. I never exchanged a word with them. So many people spend their lives like that."

Since writing the play, Gilman has heard from many acquaintances who have been stalked, and she based part of her story on two friends who went through something similar, one of whom eventually had to move. Theresa is incensed when a colleague wants to write up her story, so did Gilman ask permission to cannibalise her friends' experiences? "Writers never ask because then they say no and you can't use it. I guess I'm a bad person."

Boy Gets Girl is clearly a sister piece to Spinning into Butter. They are both plays about strong but isolated women, and they ask us to confront the politically incorrect beast within.

"Spinning into Butter is about white people who objectify black people, so I wrote about the objectifiers in that case. But as most women do, I know what it's like to be on the other end of that. One guy asked me if there are any good men in my world after seeing this play. I chafe at that because there are so many plays written by men that have absolutely ridiculous female characters and nobody ever even bothers to bring that up. As much as I admire his playwriting, David Mamet cannot write a female character to save his life. Especially Oleanna."

The play's most endearing male character is a Russ Meyer figure, whom Theresa interviews. She deplores his fixation with large breasts, but Gilman is less judgmental. "There's nothing that threatening about him because you know where he stands."

She's much shirtier about romantic comedies that sanction stalking as a way of getting the girl. "High Fidelity is a movie I liked very much, apart from its romantic plotline. He stalked that woman and he ended up with her, and that's so common. Think about My Fair Lady and that song On the Street Where You Live - it's really creepy." I'm not sure we need take too many lessons on romance from Gilman. She and her long-term boyfriend married this year so she "could get covered on his health insurance".