There's something about Will Eno. He has two productions running in London right now - at the Soho Theatre and The Print Room. There's little doubt, this Brooklyn based playwright has a voice us Londoners like. Maybe it's because he's described as comic, disturbing, and provocative. See for yourself. Fresh from a sell-out run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe come five short plays about being alive - collectively titled 'Oh, The Humanity' (at the Soho Theatre). While at The Print Room you can see 'Thom Pain (Based on Nothing)' which was first performed in 2004 at the Soho Theatre before transferring to Broadway where it was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Will has received the highest acclaim in both London and America, where the Telegraph declared "it's hard to imagine more dazzling writing on any stage" and the New York Times dubbed Eno "a Samuel Beckett for the Jon Stewart generation". On top of that he's just won a PEN Literary Award in America (which so happens to be the worlds oldest human rights organisation). Here Will tells us about his London affair and his latest work. He's a man of truth with a great insight to humanity with all its comedy, pain and love. Tune in.

RR: Welcome to London. Good to be back?
WE: It's really good to be here. I've spent a lot of time here, but haven't been over in a while. The little story of London and me is pretty easy to recite. I dropped off a play at the stage door of the National Theatre about ten years ago. I wrote a crazy but civil note on the front page. About a month later, I got a call from Jack Bradley, the then-Literary Manager, asking if they could do a reading at the National Studio. I later learned it was  Chris Campbell, then-assistant Literary Manager and now Literature Manager over at The Royal Court, who kind of spotted the play. Anyway, these guys set up a reading, which I couldn't get over here for, which Paul Miller directed, and then he went on to direct the play at The Gate Theatre, where Erica Whyman was the boss. Right around this time, I met James Hogan and the Oberon people (about which more below). I then came back to The Gate, for "The Flu Season", which Erica directed. The next year, I sent a play, "Thom Pain", to Nina Steiger, at the Soho Theatre, who I also knew from New York. She was very supportive of it, and that went on to happen at Edinburgh and then Soho and then New York. I just played tennis with Chris, and had dinner with Erica, the other night, and will see Nina, and the whole gang, this week. It's really nice to have kept these trans-oceanic friendships going. A good ocean in the middle is not a bad thing to have, to keep a  friendship alive. London is a beautiful and mysterious place to me, but I sort of know my way around it. Not in a way that lessens the mystery - I just understand, in a basic way, how to get from one mystery to the next. Central Line to the Piccadilly, for instance."

RR: Charles Isherwood, theatre critic for The New York Times, has called you "a Samuel Beckett for the Jon Stewart generation" - that's one hot accolade. Does it feel good to be Will Eno?
WE: Sometimes, yeah. That quote put a little extra elevator in my step, which I think you call a lift, over here. I'm a big big fan of Beckett's. I remember reading that he was pretty good about picking up his friends at the airport in Paris. That's a good friend. I like that line, "Anyone living love you now, Joe?" Also, "no love, no love, such as it is normally vented on the speechless infant." I may have these slightly wrong but I hope not. They both have the word "love" in them, I just noticed. Anyway, yeah, it feels good to be me sometimes, as I hope and trust it feels good to be anyone, sometimes. There was a long patch, maybe a decade or two, where it didn't feel that good and I kind of moped around and felt this very heavy thing in my chest. It's pretty easy to misunderstand the entire thing, you know? We learn about the value of our existence at the same time we're learning to write the alphabet or learn how a door works, and with the same cognitive powers, which aren't so developed at that age, so it's easy to see how a person could get it very wrong, and even almost all wrong.

RR: 'Oh, The Humanity' at Soho Theatre is made up of five short plays - can you tease us with a whistle stop tour of each?
WE: Okay, here goes. The first one is about the coach of a sports team. He's had a rough year and he's doing a press conference. He's trying to find value and positivity in the fact of losing - and not just losing games but losing hair and teeth and time. The second one is about two people recording a video for a dating service, who both just want someone to talk with, someone to say what their life has felt like to, and in the saying of it they achieve this kind of virtual moment of togetherness, maybe, maybe. The next is a spokeswoman for an airline. She is speaking to a group of people (us) who are in the middle of trying to find their way through a bewildering and tragic event. She ends up, accidentally, taking on the question of, How do you live when you know you're going to die? The third is called The Bully Composition and it involves some people taking a picture of the audience. It's kind of about trying to find a definition of the Present Moment and trying to see clearly what you're in the middle of, in a larger context, rather than just the hour before and the hour after. Although, even to see that clearly is pretty good work. The fifth is probably about how we, as the particular species that we are, tend to live with incredibly specificity but also, at the same time, in a huge field of unknowing. And how that takes its toll. But how we manage, sort of. Then, that's it, please clap if you feel like clapping, check under your seat and make sure you have all your belongings, and off you go into the night, or day, if you're a matinee person.

RR: 'Thom Pain (Based on Nothing)' at The Print Room is your much acclaimed Pulitzer-prize nominated one-man play, described as a 'man's anguished journey from shattered childhood dreams to the tenuous optimism of adulthood'. Can you share with us the highs and lows of writing this monologue?
WE: I remember really clearly writing the line, "I'm the type of person you might not hear from for some time, but then, suddenly, one day, bang, you never hear from me again."  That was a happy day because it really described something and it felt like I got something profitable and lasting, from this stupid and fearful behaviour I had displayed in my life. It took a long time to write so there were a lot of ups and downs, related to writing the thing, and also just life stuff that was going on. If you take a year or two to write something, you really are about a hundred different people sitting in that same chair. I had an important dog, Emily. It was hard but good to think about her, to remember how great and gentle she was. I think I learned about gentleness and trueness from that dog. When she got older, she used to like to eat tissue paper, for some reason.

RR: Your plays are published by London based Oberon Books who you've described as an 'old-time Hemingway in Paris publisher'. Can you tell us more about this wonderfully romantic vision?
WE: Yes. James Hogan, who runs it, is just one of the greatest of people. He cares. I've been over here, or he's been in New York, and he's said, "You look skinny. Here," and he'll tuck a little roll of the local currency into my pocket. He's almost impossibly generous, and endlessly loyal, and a person with really fine taste and a kind of quietly elegant view of the world, but with all that, he's still scrupulously unpretentious. And he's a great publisher. What he and Charles Glanville have built is a real and total and meaningful thing and they make beautiful books.

RR: How has it been having your plays directed by RSC deputy Director Erica Whyman (ex-Artistic Director of the Gate Theatre)?
WE: I've known Erica for a long time and she's a great friend and I'm just very glad. I have not been able to be around the production as much as I'd like, but we did a couple of Skype calls a year or so ago, when they were getting ready to do it in Newcastle. When Erica and I were having dinner, the other night, we were both struck by that funny thing that everyone gets struck by, where it seems like so much time has gone by, years and years, and they really have, but it also seems like not even a week has gone by, like there's not even such a thing as time.

RR: What would you like your audience to walk away with having seen 'Oh, The Humanity' and 'Thom Pain (Based on Nothing)'?
WE: To be brief, I'll just say the true and embarrassing thing. I'd like people to walk away with some weird and maybe new or maybe forgotten sense of the specialness and strangeness and once-ness of their own lives, and of life itself. I would feel really happy to think that someone walked out onto the street and the world kind of shimmered a little bit. I know that that's a huge thing to want, but, you asked.

RR: Could you treat us to a Will Eno London anecdote?
WE: I had a great day, a bunch of years ago, walking through Green Park with my friend Joe, pretending we were French. Joe was drinking a terrible cup of coffee in a styrofoam cup and holding it aloft and saying, "C'est une chose magnifique." I remember one time, a long time ago, I ran out of money and had a couple more days before my flight. I ended up staying at something called The Tonbridge Club. It was just a gymnasium and they gave you a piece of foam to sleep on. The name sounded so classy. I always thought it would be funny to send friends there. "You must stay at The Tonbridge Club, while you're over there. Make sure you mention my name." Speaking of clubs, James Hogan sponsors something called The Boiled Egg Club, which is, just, you go over to his house and sit around and everyone has a boiled egg. I don't have any anecdotes about bees, but I have read that London honey is some of the best honey because of the crazy variety of flowers in all the gardens. I'd like to have an anecdote about London beekeepers. I know the question was not "What would l like to have a London anecdote about." Sorry. Oh, wait - crossing the street. It really is funny, with the cars coming from a different direction than you expect. I get to a crosswalk, and the paint on the street says "Look Right," and my instinct is to look left, and I sort of panic and don't look either direction and just kind of hunch my shoulders up and squint my eyes and hope that whatever hits me doesn't hit me that hard. It sort of scares me to think that that's my inner voice, telling me to do that.

Will Eno: 'Oh, The Humanity'
now until 13 Oct
at Soho Theatre
21 Dean Street, London W1D 3NE
sohotheatre.com

Will Eno: 'Thom Pain (Based on Nothing)'
now until 13 October
at The Print Room
34 Hereford Road, London W2 5AJ
the-print-room.org