Ravenhill pools his resources

It was Nan Goldin's photographs that did it. 'That scene that Goldin documented in the 1980s - it was all about illness, recovery, friendship and making art,' says Mark Ravenhill.

'There's a particular sequence in which Goldin starts recording herself in hospital after suffering a terrible accident. And I thought: that's it. That's the starting point.'

The result is his new play, Pool (no water), produced in collaboration with Frantic Assembly.

As luck would have it, the physical theatre company had also been struck by Goldin's provocative photographs. Frantic is better known for cultivating beautifully choreographed theatre in the late 1990s that harnessed the energy of club culture with a sense of pre-millennial ennui such as Sell Out and Hymns.

Yet they too had been niggled by Goldin's images for some time. 'People react from the gut to her work,' explains co-artistic director Steven Hoggett. 'You can really feel the stories behind the pictures.'

Pool (no water) is about four artists and their much more successful, wealthy friend, who has just suffered a terrible accident. As they gather next to her prone, unconscious body in hospital, it occurs to them that her experience may make a good subject for a piece of art.

'I've always been quite ambivalent about that sort of self-obsessive, "All The Men I've Ever Slept With'' style of work,' says Ravenhill. 'The idea of art as a piece of personal suffering has always struck me as sad.

'I prefer work that's more ambiguous: Brett Easton Ellis's recent novel Lunar Park, for example, is brilliant, because it starts off by presenting itself as autobiographical and then descends into a Stephen King-style horror novel that ends up parodying confessional art. 'So I wanted the play to ask questions about the boundaries between truth and fiction.'

Ravenhill has previously been dismissive of physical theatre and Hoggett admits that they would have been far too star-struck to approach Ravenhill first. Nonetheless, they've clearly found common ground.

'Frantic was looking to write about an older generation,' says Ravenhill. 'And I had recently been struck by how many of the people I was meeting had been through rehab. Go to the Groucho these days and no one is talking about drugs any more; they're all talking about their experiences in rehab. So the characters in Pool are burnt out.'

Ravenhill has long thrown off the shackles of his audacious debut Shopping And F**king: this year alone his plays have included the dark political thriller The Cut, which played at the Donmar with Ian McKellen, and his forthcoming pantomime Dick Whittington at the Barbican.

Nonetheless, with its preoccupation with mortality and sickness, it's hard not to see Pool (no water) as an update on the hedonistic, nihilistic generation Ravenhill nailed so memorably with his career opener.