His 2001 play Lobby Hero – about to receive a local production by new Melbourne theatre company Around the Moon Productions – is similarly low-key on the surface. It’s a four-hander set entirely in the lobby of a New York apartment building, and is mostly dialogue-driven. It’s also utterly compelling.

Lonergan attributes his low-key approach to growing up in the 1970s. “You go down a list of ‘70s movies year by year, the sheer number of not just good but great movies every single year is very embarrassing if you happen to be in one of the subsequent decades.

‘‘But it was pretty standard fare in the ‘70s to have quiet movies with real characters on not necessarily predictable arcs, not teaching little lessons and adages by the end, not learning and growing and believing in themselves as the standard through-line for each story. I think I grew up in that tradition and it’s the tradition that I lean towards most naturally.’’

Lobby Hero is dripping with Lonergan’s signature mix of whipcrack humour and deep, textured characterisation. It follows the sparring between two security guards and two cops in the lobby that the former pair guard, and ripples with the rivalry, envy, lust and fear they inspire in one other. Allegiances are formed and broken, trust is betrayed, empathy rises from unexpected quarters.

It grew from an image Lonergan had of a man and a woman who are dressed in nearly identical uniforms, but only the woman is armed. ‘‘All the different layers of status involved in that, and him being attracted to her while she’s trying to be an officer, and the division between her professional behaviour and her personal feelings. The imposition upon her is much more rigid than it is on him. On the other hand she’s the one with a gun, so her status is way higher.’’

Playwrights and actors often bang on about status – which character has the upper hand and which the lower during a particular scene. Lonergan makes all that look like baby talk. At any point in his writing a character might be aggressive, fragile, dominant and self-deprecating all at once. Throw another few people into the same scene and you have relational dynamics that swirl and eddy to a dizzying degree.

“That’s one of the things that I tend to notice so it’s one of the things I tend to write about,” he says. “The obvious example is when you’re a kid and you see one of your parents at a disadvantage in the grown-up world, and it rocks your impression of them completely, and your whole sense of the order of the world. You start to see all those layers in their lives that have nothing to do with their role as your parent.”