When Tim Price went to Ludlow in Shropshire, the Cardiff playwright looked at what was going on beyond the surface of a town he describes as "the gastronomic centre of England".

What he found during three weeks of development as part of a group of writers seconded by the Ludlow-based Pentabus company was serious food for thought. Beyond the abattoirs and the Michelin-starred restaurants was a disaffected younger population with little or nothing to call their own.

The result of this research is For Once, Price's first full-length stage play, following stints on television penning the likes of Secret Diary of A Call Girl, after cutting his teeth with DIY guerilla theatre company Dirty Protest back in Cardiff. Following a successful run in 2011, For Once tours to Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre this week, where former director of Pentabus, Orla O'Loughlin, has recently taken over from Dominic Hill as artistic director.

"It's about food and the politics of food," Price says of For Once. "I did a week-long residency in Ludlow, which is quite a middle-class town, with no obvious outlet for the kids there. I talked to a couple of teenagers in town and the two main things I could see going on there were its food culture and teen deaths. I thought about how these two were connected and the young people I spoke to said they spent most of their time driving to other towns to go to Pizza Hut and McDonald's, where they felt welcome."

Originally written as a monologue, For Once now inter-weaves three different points of view to make up a very different image of a small-town community than the picture postcard ideal.

"People tend to move to the country in Ludlow so their children can avoid the risks of big city living, but the risks are still there. The biggest risk for anyone at that age is under-stimulation. If a teenager gets into the wrong car or the wrong bed, it can result in tragedy."

Price never planned to be a playwright, but came to the theatre via a creative writing course at university.

"I was a proper lazy student," he says, "and, to be frank, the only reason I took the course was because there were no exams. I never had any ambitions to be a writer and I never went to the theatre, but I seemed to do quite well with it. Then I went on the dole and wrote a short film, but there wasn't a plan. If I'd have got one of the hundreds of jobs I applied for, who knows what might have happened, but I had a degree in philosophy and English which are completely useless for most sectors."

Price applied to be everything from a rock climbing instructor to an agent with MI5, but ended up working for a time as a journalist. It was here, he reckons, he began to be drawn to the stories that now feeds into his plays. He learnt to talk to people, he reckons, and to ask the awkward questions necessary for him to get what he wanted.

Price's extended period on the dole with like-minded colleagues also led to the formation of Dirty Protest. With a dearth of non-mainstream outlets in Cardiff, the company opted to present work in bars, clubs and even kebab shops rather than theatres.

"There's not much in the way of independent theatre in Cardiff," Price says, "so a group of us decided to do something that was dirt cheap and lo-fi. We were just putting on the kind of nights we wanted to go to, but that generated a whole scene of work for young people who couldn't afford to go to big theatres and who maybe found something with us that was saying something about their lives."

While For Once goes on tour, another play by Price, Salt, Rock and Roe, has just been nominated for an Olivier award. Price is also currently in rehearsals for a major new work for National Theatre Wales. The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning looks at the background of the 24-year-old American soldier accused of releasing thousands of US Embassy documents to WikiLeaks. This included the so-called "collateral murder" video of American soldiers in an airborne helicopter in Iraq apparently shooting civilians on the ground.

"That really shocked me," Price says. "I'd been following WikiLeaks but up until then I hadn't realised how important it was, because a lot of the source material is quite dry."

With Manning's trial pending, Price's interest in his story came from somewhere infinitely closer to home.

"What's under-reported about Bradley Manning is that he's half Welsh," Price explains. "Because of that I think he's someone we should care about. There were six million people with the same security clearance as Bradley Manning, but he's the only person who's allegedly leaked things, and presumably the only person who was in part brought up in Wales. I wanted to look at whether that shaped his radicalisation, coming, as he does, from a country with a long and proud radical history that Wales has."

With Manning still in prison, Price's play opens in Manning's old school, Tasker Milward in Haverfordwest. In keeping with its internet-age setting, the play will also be streamed live online, complete with links to all documents referred to in the script.

"I hope it's an important play for the campaign [to free Manning]", says Price, "and really important for National Theatre Wales as well."

Price's work on The Radicalisation of Bradley Manning also led directly to him writing Demos, a new verbatim play inspired by the Occupy movement and written for a cast of 50.

"While I was writing the Bradley Manning play I got involved with a group of activists and became interested in ideas of democracy," Price says. "These activists with the Occupy movement do everything by consensus and twice a day have a general assembly in which everything from where to put the Portaloos to what should happen to the national debt is discussed, with everyone having an equal voice. They publish minutes of these assemblies and the time I was down it had been quite a difficult night. The police had been down, and, while there were a few ugly moments, there were some beautiful ones as well. I compared that with Prime Minister's Question Time the next day, so there's these two versions of democracy with which we get the audience involved in it as well."

All of this activity from Price comes following stints working on Casualty, Holby City and EastEnders, while he's currently working on a comedy drama for ITV2 called Switch. "It's about four witches living in Camden," Price laughs. "It's like Sex and the City with spells."

Demos, meanwhile, form part of the Traverse's Write Here season of rehearsed readings and workshops of new plays by writers relatively unknown in Scotland and who are on much the same level as Price was in the early days of Dirty Protest.

"Something like Write Here is exactly what's needed, somewhere where emerging writers can rub shoulders with each other and create networks," Price says. "It comes from the same desire we had to create a hub where writers can cut their teeth and make the connections for them to develop. No genius ever came out of a vacuum, after all. Also, with cuts in funding these community cultures will keep bubbling up.

There are less and less bridging and attachment schemes for writers, so I think DIY culture in theatre is here to stay."

For Once, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, tomorrow to April 14, www.traverse.co.uk.