Neil Bartlett: I got you under my skin

Neil Bartlett isn't big on first names. Few of his characters have them. In his first novel, Ready To Catch Him Should He Fall, the main characters are called simply "Boy" and "O" (short for "Older Man"). His second, Whitbread Award-nominated, novel revolved around two characters called "Mr Clive and Mr Page". His new novel, Skin Lane, centres on the enigmatically-named "Mr F". It's not until page 41 that we discover his surname is Freeman.

So here we are, Mr Bartlett and Mr Burston, at the Drill Hall Theatre in London where, 20 years ago, I saw Bartlett perform stark bollock naked in his theatrical tribute to Simeon Solomon, A Vision of Love Revealed In Sleep. Today he's fully dressed and rather less theatrical, though his emotions are pretty bare even if he isn't. Twice during the next hour he will weep at the memory of men he has loved.

Writer, performer, director, translator - Bartlett has had many parallel careers over the past two decades. He began his working life as a street clown with Simon McBurney of Theatre de Complicité. In 1987 he formed the Gloria Theatre Company and, over the next seven years, created 13 original works for the stage including A Vision of Love and the chamber opera Sarrasine. In 1988, he published his first book, a groundbreaking study of gay life in Victorian England entitled Who Was That Man? A Present For Mr Oscar Wilde. The book prompted a somewhat excitable Edmund White to remark that "Bartlett has grabbed history by the collar and made bitter love to it".

Similar plaudits greeted his forays into fiction, which again demonstrated his love of history. Ruth Rendell praised "Mr Clive and Mr Page" as "a marvellous evocation of 1920s London". And although it's been 10 years since Bartlett's last novel, he hasn't been resting on his laurels. From 1994 to 2004, he was artistic director of the Lyric Hammersmith. This, despite almost dying and undergoing a liver transplant in 1999. The following year he was awarded an OBE for services to the theatre.

He left the Lyric in November 2004 knowing he had another novel in him, but not really knowing what it was about. "I just knew I wanted to go inside," he explains. "I'd been living a very public life for 10 years. I ran a theatre. And I knew that one of the things I wanted to do when I stepped away from that was, I wanted to go inside. Writing a book is a very isolated activity anyway. You're locked in a room and you're not allowed out. And this book is all about going inside. The story of the book is about going further and further into that man's head."

"That man" is the aforementioned Mr F - 47, single, a furrier by trade and a man who has "never shared his bed". So when he's plagued by nightmares involving a man's naked body, he can't for the life of him think where they've come from. Set against the London fur trade during the long, hot summer of 1967, Skin Lane follows Mr F as he struggles to find the key to his nightmares and unlocks some terrifying truths about himself. Slowly our Mr F learns that he isn't quite the man he thought he was.

"You know that phrase, 'getting under somebody's skin'?", says Bartlett. "Well, if this book is about anything, it's the idea of getting under somebody's skin - a man's skin in particular. When I hit on the idea of his job, I knew I had the book. This is a man who cuts skin for living. And fur is extraordinary. It's like leather, but times 10 in terms of its potency. There's the luxury, the cruelty, the incredible femininity, but also the incredible masculinity of fur. I don't know anyone who doesn't have a response to fur ...We live in a culture where bodies are presented to us all the time. We're surrounded by this sexual culture. And yet I don't buy it. I don't believe in the instant gratification. I think every man has unpacked mythologies inside him, and I think we're all still grappling with the mysteries of our childhood, and with the mysteries of desire..."

Suddenly his eyes fill with tears. "I'm sorry", he says. "I find this very difficult to put into words... What I'm trying to say is, if I was conscious of anything, it was wanting to talk about this mysterious, terrifying, marvellous thing which is another man's body."

What he wasn't conscious of, at least not initially, were the parallels between his story and a much older tale, namely Beauty and the Beast. The women in the cutting room where Mr F works even refer to the boss's nephew as Beauty. What attracted Bartlett to that fairy tale in particular?

He breaks into a grin. "Well", he says. "I am a homosexual. I'm going to sound flip now, but the old line used to be 'Arthur or Martha?'. One of the things that makes us different as gay men is that we are both penetrator and penetrated, possessor and possessed. I think it has a profound influence throughout our lives. And I think Beauty and the Beast illustrates perfectly that dichotomy. Are you the vulnerable princess, or are you the ravishing hairy monster? The strange thing about the story, of course, is that the powerful person, the instigator, the instrument of salvation, is actually Beauty. It's Beauty who saves the Beast. I had no idea that I was retelling that story, not until I was a long way into the book."

Bartlett doesn't remember being read fairy stories as a child. "I must have been because I know them all," he says. "What I do remember is a picture in a book from when I was young. It was a picture of the Beast, not as this hulking great monster, but as a rather small, vulnerable creature who has to be saved by Beauty. I remember this from when I was a teenager, and was first starting to lie awake in bed at night and dream about men coming to rescue me from my life."

This dream of being rescued and discovering a different way of life crops up again and again in Bartlett's work. It's there in Who Was That Man?, where the author reimagines Wilde's London and is led down unfamiliar streets by men who lived a hundred years ago. It's there again in Skin Lane, where Mr F feasts his eyes on a young man asleep on a train, or follows another man he encounters at Cannon Street Station.

"Did you ever read Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse as a boy?" Bartlett asks. "Well, there's a young man and he's walking down an alleyway and there's a door in the wall, and he knows that if he goes through that door there's going to be another world on the other side of it. Part of every gay man's story is that moment where you ask yourself where your world is, where you fit in. And then you go through that door and you discover another world. You enter a world in which you can finally become your own man. And that's something that seems very important to us."

But surely it's less important now than it was, say, 30 years ago? Haven't we left the twilight world of the homosexual behind?

Bartlett smiles. "You say that. And in certain cities in Britain, you can lead a pretty civilised life as a gay man now. And yet what's the biggest development in gay London in the past five years? Vauxhall, where we have created an entire new nocturnal world and geography! It's almost as if we've created a new underworld. It's hard-wired into our culture as gay men, that we have an alternative map of the world in our heads. You drop any reasonably together gay man in any city in the world and I would give him 45 minutes to have worked out where is the corner that you stand on, or the doorway that you go through, or the bus station you loiter in. It's a very powerful part of our culture. And my version of that as an artist has been to show people the way. I think my job is to lead the unsuspecting reader up a dark alley and show them a good time."

If all this sounds a tad melodramatic, there's no doubting his sincerity. Bartlett has always been an unapologetically gay artist, equally at home performing in gay bars and clubs as on "legitimate" stages, proudly listing his gay press awards alongside more prestigious honours. Ask him to name some of the highlights and he goes misty eyed. "Bette Bourne emerging from the shadows at the beginning of Sarrasine, with the diamond earrings glinting in the darkness. Bette putting her arms around me in the middle of A Vision of Love Revealed In Sleep and just holding me together..."

Suddenly his voice cracks and tears spill down his cheeks. "The thing that makes me proudest is when someone comes up to me and says they read one of my books or they saw something I did on stage 20 years ago and it really made a difference. I'm sorry I'm so weepy, but I'm very tired and it does make me cry because I think of all the people who aren't here anymore."

There's a minute's silence as I hand him a tissue and he wipes his eyes. Earlier he described his work as an attempt to "bear witness to the truth of our gay lives," and clearly we live in a time when that truth involves a certain amount of grief. So what does he think of those writers who prefer not to be pigeonholed as gay? "Oh do people still worry about that one?" he asks, blowing his nose. "I spent much of the Eighties with a lot of people who work in the worlds of theatre and writing novels and who seemed to think it was incredibly important to say: 'I'm not a gay writer, I'm a writer who happens to be gay'. What exactly is these people's problem? The stories I tell may be riddled with gayness, but that happens to be where my art comes from."

He grins. "Of course, there's another version of that question, which is: 'Do I want to be in the fiction section or the gay section at my local bookshop?' And my answer to that is: 'I want to be on both shelves'."

Neil Barlett's new novel, 'Skin Lane', is published on 22 March (Serpent's Tail £10.99). To order a copy for £9.99 (free p&p), call Independent Books Direct on 08700 798 897