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David Eldridge wowed the critics again this week with his new version of Ibsen's classic. He tells Dominic Cavendish about the play's echoes of his own story

One of the young turks who burst with revitalising energy on to the theatre scene in the mid-'90s, Essex-born playwright David Eldridge may not be as well known as some of his contemporaries but, still only 32, he's one of the few to have had a West End hit.

Festen, his version of the cult Danish film of the same name by Thomas Vinterberg, drew ecstatic applause at the Almeida in 2004 and proceeded to storm Shaftesbury Avenue. Next year Broadway audiences will be able to sup on its tale of parental abuse exhilaratingly exposed at an excruciating birthday party - where celebratory decorum is maintained even in the face of unpalatable truth.

Though Festen's success hasn't meant a significant change in material circumstances for Eldridge - as he swiftly assures me, "It's not as if I can bugger off to the Bahamas now" - in professional terms his standing has rocketed. He was vindicated in his restrained dramatisation of the film, and his facility for astute, unflashy adaptation was noted by the Donmar's Michael Grandage, who leapt at the chance to work with him on Ibsen's The Wild Duck.

Eldridge's new version, which opened this week to rave reviews, caps another year of stealthy success on various fronts: an original work, Incomplete and Random Acts of Kindness, was lauded at the Royal Court in May, and his small-screen treatment of Simon Garfield's Hidden Lives was the jewel in the crown of BBC4's acclaimed "Lost Decade" season commemorating the '50s.

So why is he so wild about The Wild Duck, which brings an unfestive touch of Norwegian gloom to London's theatreland for the Christmas period? Like Festen, it concerns the way truth-telling blows a family apart, only here it's a young innocent, Hedvig, rather than a corrupt adult who is sacrificed on the altar of honesty.

"I've loved the play since I was a teenager," Eldridge says, his estuary accent so soft, his speech so measured that all stereotypical assumptions of his being some kind of upstart boy-racer are immediately confounded. "It's an incredibly modern play. We are encouraged all the time to purge ourselves, to tell all, whether it's on Jerry Springer or in private. But is that a good thing? About a year ago I met a woman who worked at Relate. I said: 'I'm not advocating a return to the buttoned-up '50s, but how many relationships do you think honesty has cost as well as saved?' She had to admit that it was half and half. That question, the cost of honesty, is at the heart of Ibsen's play."

The challenge, as he saw it, was "to bring a scalpel" to the text. When he first read the literal translation, the number of times Ibsen mentioned "the wild duck" in the dialogue nearly drove him demented. "In a practical way, that can really grate on an audience - so as the writer of a new version, you need a lightness of touch."

As with Festen, this was far more than just an interesting diversion from the task of penning original plays. The Wild Duck fits in with ongoing preoccupations in his work - which, while spanning all kinds of social milieux, takes a recurring interest in the formative experiences of children and in the underdog, the outsider. In the impoverished Hjalmar Ekdal, who is trying to better himself and disowns his disgraced father, he caught glimpses of himself.

As he explains: "I had a slightly schizophrenic adolescence - a very poor home family life but a scholarship place at a public school [Brentwood], so I've grown up keenly aware of the environment and how that affects kids." His father worked in a shoe factory and on a Romford Market shoe-stall at weekends. As a teenager, Eldridge junior helped out. "Although I loved working on the market, I was always uptight that someone from school would see me. And, similarly, I used to dread being seen in school uniform by anyone from Romford. With hindsight, for a writer to have those years of being very poor alongside middle-class experiences is a real advantage."

It's been quite a haphazard route from Romford market to the Donmar Warehouse. He fell into drama almost by accident, which he took as a subsidiary subject at A-level because he couldn't think of any other that appealed. There came a moment of epiphany watching John Wood's King Lear at the Barbican. "I went in with a real adolescent attitude, thinking it would be rubbish. But I was absolutely bowled over by it. From that time, my dream was to go to Stratford and direct Shakespeare. It was only when I went to university that I started to question that."

At Exeter, where he studied English and drama, he was perplexed by the prevailing interest in what he terms "heavy-handed directors' theatre". "I used to get furious with other undergraduates. My attitude was: if you want to say something, don't use somebody else's play - have the courage to speak for yourself."

His first play was begun in a white heat of anger, written late at night after losing it while revising Paradise Lost. "I just started to write dialogue. I didn't have much of an idea where it was going, I just let it take shape organically." The result was Serving It Up, an angry yet gloriously tender piece about two teenage mates on an east London housing estate, which premièred at the Bush theatre early in 1996.

That anger is still there. Eldridge got bravely, eloquently bolshy in the Guardian recently, condemning its lead critic Michael Billington for being stuck in the past and far too dismissive of the elliptical style he tends to favour. But there's no visible chip on his shoulder. You certainly feel that he's too passionate about his craft ever to let class antagonisms obstruct his vision of how others live.

"At the end of the day," he says, "you're either interested in other people and their circumstances or you're not. You're either compassionate or you're not." On the evidence of the past 10 years, David Eldridge has got compassion in spades. Romford should be proud of him.