"They have a quirky sense of humour there," he laughs. "It was very cold, but the Berliners kept making fun if I wore my long johns. In the end I had to give them up to safeguard my masculinity."
He was invited to Berlin for a reading of his play, Rabbit, which won last year's Griffin Award, and then toured Britain for 10 weeks.
He has also won the Patrick White Playwrights' Award and is working on a second commission from the Sydney Festival for next summer after his first, ATM, was staged in 2002.
While fitting in stints as an actor - he is in the Karvan series that has been bought by Foxtel - he is also working on a second play for the Sydney Theatre Company's Blueprints series, an adaptation of Seneca's Roman classic, Thyestes, about warring brothers.
"It is very appropriate for the tense times we are living through right now," he says.
But Cowell is the first to admit that the times have been good to him. "I think if I started writing today I wouldn't have nearly as big an impact as I did five years ago," he says. "Then there was a void on the fringe and I was able to fill it."
He says two Sydney theatres are particularly devoted to the fringe, Old Fitzroy (where he started) and Downstairs at Belvoir Street.
"A hit play can arise anywhere but those two venues are pretty much it," he says.
Although he acknowledges the boom of the past three years, he is annoyed that much of it seems a copy of mainstream theatre. "There isn't much sign of any anarchic aggression," he says. "It's not clear what a lot of stuff on the fringe stands for."
While Cowell knows little about Melbourne's theatre scene, he says the impulse to stage classical dramas by authors such as Seneca came from expatriate Melbourne director Barrie Kosky.
Kosky staged a version of Seneca's Oedipus at the Sydney Theatre Company in 2000 before leaving for Vienna, and Cowell says this was a revelation to his generation of theatre workers.
But classical interpretations have been a feature of Melbourne's fringe scene for the past 20 years, which of course produced Kosky in the first place, via Melbourne University.
One of the most recent examples of the continuing relevance of classical heritage was Daniel Schlusser's production of Medea for the 2002 Melbourne Festival.
Happy New, directed by Ben Harkin, is at The Store Room, corner of Scotchmer Street and St George's Road, North Fitzroy, from Friday until June 20. Book on 9486 5651.
This article was found at http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/06/01/1086058836018.html