For the man who came up with a title as memorable as Shopping and F***ing, Mark Ravenhill is oddly uncomfortable about naming his plays. “I hate it, absolutely hate it,” he says. “It can take longer than writing the script itself.” So, when the 41-year-old playwright opened a newspaper and found the perfect title for his cycle of 16 short plays about the “war on terror”, he knew he had to steal it. “It was in a story about one of the big video-game companies,” he says. “They’d become worried their games were getting too literary - too many words on screen. So, management called a crisis meeting and the designers were ordered to go back to basics. Well, they put their heads together and, when they came back, they had reduced the essence of gaming to the briefest of formulas: ‘Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat.’” Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat: it certainly packs a lot into four words. A nod towards the West’s neocolonial adventures in the Middle East. An allusion to the idea (popularised by the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard) that modern warfare, seen through the prism of 24-hour media, has assumed the unreality of a computer game. More than that, Ravenhill’s pilfered title goes straight to the heart of the plays themselves. At 20 minutes, each self-contained drama is just long enough to hit its target and plunder some theatrical gold before leaving the audience eager to repeat the experience. Individually, they have a telegraphic directness; together, they offer an impressively nuanced response to one of the great issues of the age.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Shoot/Get Treasure/ Repeat - which this month gets a London outing courtesy of the National Theatre, the Royal Court, Out of Joint, the Gate and Paines Plough, a new-writing company - is that it reached the stage at all. In March 2007, Ravenhill, who has suffered from epilepsy for more than a decade, had a huge seizure. An attempt to insert an air tube left him starved of oxygen for several minutes. After he fell into a coma, his parents were warned that he would probably be left brain-damaged.

Coming round two weeks later, he found that someone had put photographs of his life by his bed to remind him who he was. Thankfully, they were unnecessary. “I just laughed,” he says. “‘For God’s sake, don’t be so dramatic. Take those things down.’” There was one side effect, however: he could recall nothing he had done in the six weeks before the seizure.

In particular, he had no recollection of agreeing to write a play a day for the Edinburgh Fringe. Many writers would, understand-ably, have crawled back under the hospital bedclothes. For Ravenhill, however, the discipline of writing “an epic in YouTube-sized chunks” became a kind of therapy. “I was still slightly invalided - pumped full of drugs and in this odd postcoma state - so I used to just get up and write. I didn’t work on anything else.”

By the time the festival came, he had more than five hours of material, loosely structured around a military invasion and occupation. A few of the plays are set in an Iraq-like country suffering under misguided nation-building; most take place closer to home. A middle-class couple discuss moving to a gated community. A controlling woman watches over her lover’s hospital bed. An air stewardess confronts her neigh-bour about screams in the night.

If that sounds po-faced, it couldn’t be further from the truth. Ravenhill has a mischievous humour, often aimed at the well-meaning middle classes who marched against the war, as he did. His postcards from the edge make the audience squirm, but are never preachy and are usually tempered by sympathy towards those cast adrift in an age of anxiety. The result is a 3-D portrait of a world in which fear, guilt and distrust have leached into everyday life like slow poison in the water supply.

“I think we were already pulling up the drawbridge in our personal lives before anything as big and threatening as terrorism started happening,” Ravenhill says. “That sense of locking your front door and hiding yourself away. I think terrorism has just hurried it along.”

In Edinburgh, Ravenhill for Breakfast (as the series was then called) was staged at the ungodly hour of 9.30am. Actors and directors were “borrowed” from other shows, and the price of a ticket included coffee and a bacon roll. If free food was intended to buy the goodwill of a hungover audience, it was unnecessary. Once word of mouth took off, ticket demand was so great that the Traverse theatre had to move the show from a studio space to its main house. The early-morning shot of theatrical caffeine became the festival’s most talked-about event.

On the back of that success, the London productions had no problem conscripting strong acting talent, including Harriet Walter, Deborah Findlay, Toby Jones, Lesley Manville, Joseph Millson, Joanna Riding and Amit Shah, as well as the director Max Stafford-Clark. So far, so simple. A trickier challenge was recreating the sense of occasion that surrounded the Edinburgh shows without repeating the breakfast format.

It was the artistic director of the Royal Court, Dominic Cooke, who came up with the idea of scattering the plays around a range of venues at different times of the day and night. “Dominic’s idea was that it should be a bit like Antony Gormley sculptures,” Ravenhill says. “They would pop up for a while, then disappear again.”

Some of the settings are more unusual than others. Cooke has chosen to stage one of the plays - a creepy two-hander about a child who wakes to find a headless soldier sitting on his bed - at midnight. Similarly, the Gate taps into the craze for site-specific theatre, taking the audience on a magical mystery tour to a secret location somewhere in Notting Hill, west London.

Perhaps the most atmospheric of the venues, however, is Village Underground, a Victorian coal warehouse turned party place in Shoreditch, east London, where Paines Plough has set up shop. With its exposed brickwork, rich with the soot of 100 years, and vaulted cellars, it convincingly doubles for a ruined city.

“I love the height of it,” says Paines Plough’s artistic director, Roxana Silbert. “It makes me think of those pictures of the Blitz where a bomb has exploded in the street, taking with it the entire wall of a block of flats, but leaving intact the rooms behind and everything in them. It’s the perfect space to put the epic against the domestic, which Mark does so well.”

That, and upsetting expectations. Just when you think you’ve got a handle on where Ravenhill is coming from, the final play of the cycle wrong-foots you, savagely lampooning a group of performers who arrive in a ruined city to do workshops with people after a war.

“I suppose I wanted to end it with a question,” he says. “Have artists really got anything worth adding to this problem? It’s easy to think, ‘We are a theatre audience. We’re terribly liberal. And there are these terrible soldiers and politicians who aren’t like us.’ So I wanted to implicate us, myself included.”

Perhaps he should have called it Shoot Self/Get Treasure/ Repeat?

The plays are at the RoyalCourt, SW1, the Gate, W11, and Village Underground, EC2, until April 20; www.shootgettreasurerepeat.com . Radio 3 will broadcast one of them on April 20 at 8pm

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