Neil LaBute's forestry commission

Neil LaBute is not an asshole. Weirdly, this is a fact that continues to surprise his critics (he has many) and his fans (he has even more). Maybe they're getting fiction and reality mixed up. But it's easy to see why. From the vengeful losers who date and dump a deaf girl in 1997 film 'In the Company of Men' to the water-cooler cavalier who persuades his peer to ditch the plus-sized woman of his dreams in 'Fat Pig' (which played at Trafalgar Studios in 2008), no living playwright has written so prolifically and amusingly about haters. He may not be one, but he's the asshole's laureate.

Currently, LaBute is directing 'Lost' star Matthew Fox and Olivia Williams in his new two-hander,
'In a Forest, Dark and Deep', at the Vaudeville. When we meet at a Southwark bar in a break from rehearsals, the fortysomething writer seems self-deprecatingly aware of that oft-repeated accusation that he's a misanthropist. 'Say how generous I was,' he jokes, paying for our drinks from an ample billfold. He is a copious person: a big, bearish man who describes himself as 'a bull in a china shop' and talks with unstoppable fluency. He defends - at length - the appeal of the asshole, an American comedy-type which has no direct British equivalent as it's somewhere on the sliding scale between cunt and wanker. 'They get all the good lines. And you invest them with a weird truth: you go, “I hate the way he said that, but there's something right about it.”

LaBute's men hail from that other US pop culture classic, 'the high-school dynamic: I want to fit in, I want to stand out.' That's something that, he argues, extends beyond adolescence. 'I had no idea until Facebook and Twitter how needy our society is. We never get out of school. It's like being in front of Erikson's imaginary audience: the horrible gaze, everyone looking. My friend, let me tell you, nobody cares. So do what you want to do.'

Men behave badly in his dramas, and words are their weapons.The comedies which have made him so popular on both sides of the Atlantic are usually short, sharp and combative, great squirm-fests for the audience and great vehicles for the actors. That's one reason so many stars have chosen them to make their West End debuts. Matthew Fox will depart from type when he plays Olivia Fox's unbearable brother in 'In a Forest, Dark and Deep', as David Schwimmer did when he picked LaBute's 'Some Girls' after years of goofy nice-guy, Ross'. Two years ago Lily Allen even said she would quit music to star in LaBute's 'Reasons to Be Pretty'. According to LaBute, 'the hurly burly of her life' got in the way.

LaBute admits he finds it harder to write the women. A good day at work on 'In a Forest...' is one when 'Olivia doesn't go, “I don't believe this” or, “It sounds like a man wrote it.”' The new comic thriller is about a brother and sister - new territory for the writer and for the man, who has no sister of his own. 'You don't have to be a murderer to write a murderer,' he argues. Then, sounding suddenly like one of his characters, 'you don't have to have your period to write about having your period.'

The 'personal stuff' is something which LaBute refuses to talk about today. Before graduating from 97 per cent Mormon university Brigham Young, in Utah, he was raised in Spokane by his hotel receptionist mother. His religion has puzzled and irked many of his liberal fans (he quit the church in 2005, before they fired him). His father, a truck driver, was 'a difficult guy to be around when he was around', and LaBute, who has two grown-up children, admits to a lot of 'missing fathers' in his plays. 'But I don't think I should spend so many months reflecting on that and turning it into a musical. I have a far better idea for a musical.' The idea, it transpires, is to remake something wildly inappropriate, like 'In the Company of Men'. 'I'd like to work with Elvis Costello,' he explains.

Typically, LaBute's got plenty of irons in the fire. In the UK, 'Reasons to Be Pretty' will come to the Almeida, where that trilogy satirising our obsession with appearances (which started with 'The Shape of Things' and includes 'Fat Pig'), began. And, a minute after joking that there are
'lots of vampires' in his new West End play, in order to cover more marketing bases, he's 'fessing up to a new adaptation of 'Dracula'.

LaBute's dream ticket is, he says, to programme the Donmar. 'If only someone would gift me that space. I could reach out, touch you, look you right in the eyes.' When I remind him that Michael Grandage's job will soon be up for grabs, he grins : 'I'd do it in a heartbeat. But I don't know if they want another American in London running a theatre. One seems to be doing well, but maybe one is enough.' Can he be serious? 'I would do it. Absolutely. But I remember devouring Peter Hall's diaries and going, hmmm, the admin sounds like a pain in the ass.'
I
n lieu of the dream Donmar gig, he obviously still gets the biggest kick taking his audience for a ride. 'It's a rollercoaster. It's not in the twist, though I have Roald Dahl-ed my way through a pack of stories.The bottom line is, the audience has to keep asking, what happens next?' Does it matter if they think the characters are assholes? 'No! I don't give a toss about people liking or disliking them. It's a case of, “Don't take me there! No! Oh! Good? Great. I'm glad we went there, Can we do it again?”'