If you’ve been frequenting the Edinburgh Fringe long enough, there’s a chance you’ll be most familiar with Tom Basden as an Edinburgh Comedy Award (formerly the Perriers, now the Fosters – you know the one) Best Newcomer winner. He scooped the prize in 2007 with his solo musical comedy show, Tom Basden Won’t Say Anything; speaking to him now, seven years later, that seems a shame, as he quickly proves an immensely likeable, articulate conversationalist. Though at times I can’t help but feel I’m embroiled in a less successful sequel. Tom Basden Can’t Say Much, perhaps.

Skyping me over a somewhat disrupted line, 6,000 miles from where he now lives in Taiwan, Basden jokes, “I feel responsible, because I’m the one who’s moved down here.” But we muddle cheerfully on, while another three miles or so away from where I’m sat fiddling with my laptop, the Arcola Tent is waiting for the next performance of Basden’s fourth staged play, Holes, to begin.

This dark, whip-smart comedy about a handful of marooned plane crash survivors is a transfer from the 2013 Edinburgh Festival, but the timing of the thing has inevitably taken up a fair amount of press attention; Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 crashed on the second day of their run. Just over a week later, Air Algérie Flight 5017 came down in Mali. “I was around for the first week and a bit of the [run]…and none of us really noticed any change in the way that the audience interpreted the play – although obviously we were aware ourselves from talking to people face-to-face that it had taken on a more sort of, well – a more unfortunately topical resonance because of what was going on.”

Philosphical about the mind-boggling unlikeliness of it all, Basden adds, “I think it’s very obvious to anyone who sees the show that there’s no way it’s a response to any of these things. So then I think it’s a question of whether people feel like the fact that it happens to coincide with these recent terrible plane crashes is something that makes the play more resonant and powerful, or potentially more problematic.”

Like most comedies, Holes is far less about the event it surrounds than it is about the characters’ reactions to it – and its topicality is clearly accidental. Not only was its first run nearly a year ago, but the script lived in Basden’s bottom drawer for some time before finally making its way to the stage. “At the time I was writing it and working on it, things like the Costa Concordia had happened and I was thinking about that,” he explains. “And I think there has been a sense of, you know, stagey, apocalyptic stuff happening in the last few years – that maybe inspired some of this. But obviously I didn’t expect it to coincide with what’s going on now in terms of planes falling out of the sky, mainly because that just seems too unlikely anyway. A few years ago, plane crashes felt very, you know… like something that didn’t really happen.”

Inevitably, Holes was intended as more of “a fable”, a vehicle through which to explore the motivations and, perhaps more frequently, shortcomings of its marooned survivors: the ever-excellent Daniel Rigby’s Ian, for instance, a blustering, rather weak man back in the real world, secretly delighted at being able to start again. “People having to fend for themselves and having to remember how to deal with things, and having to kind of get through something, can be a very funny situation,” says Basden. He’s quick to add, in light of recent events, that of course, “there’s nothing funny about people undergoing a horrible and unexpected event. But nevertheless a lot of the comedy in something like Holes comes from people trying to cope with something very extreme.”

After coming up through the Cambridge Footlights with several of his still-frequent-collaborators, and with a background in sketch and musical comedy, Basden began writing plays alongside an already successful, well-established career on the comedy circuit. He still performs occasionally, most often as Freeze! with long-term comedy partner Tim Key, but is serious about continuing to work and improve as a playwright.

“I often tried to write plays when I was younger, which were really bad because it’s very hard – writing plays is extremely difficult,” he says with a laugh. Basden’s time writing sketches as part of four-man comedy group Cowards, with Key, Lloyd Woolf and Stefan Goleszewski (now also a playwright) was “very good training, actually. But it doesn’t really help you at all with story.” This is the thing he sees as most challenging, something he’s still working on, “but I’m hoping that each time I sort of get slightly better at it.”

Part of the difficulty, he feels, lies in the fact that “with a lot of comedy you’re focusing on characters, on what’s funny about people, and as a result it can be harder to put those people in story frameworks because you have to kind of let them be themselves. And it’s the reason why I think comedy plays are quite difficult and you don’t tend to get that many of them.” Basden sees his plays as “taking characters who would feel more at home in sitcom and putting them on stage,” which is not easy to do when you consider the fact that “drama is about people changing and sitcom is about people staying the same.”

But if it’s a marriage of styles, how does working in theatre and writing plays compare to working in comedy? “I don’t think that the worlds are particularly different, to tell the truth. I think there’s a lot of Edinburgh [comedy] shows that feel very theatrical; people using very theatrical techniques and devices in comedy shows, to the extent that there’s kind of a stand-up scene, and then there’s a whole uncategorised, amorphous blob of comedy shows that are sort of a little bit theatre, a little bit cabaret, a little bit character, a little bit comedy. And that’s the sort of area that, I think, me and the people I work with always belonged to anyway.”

Holes seems to mark a distinct step in Basden’s writing career. As well as being the first play he’s written that has an interval (“intervals are hard”), it is the first staging of a play of his that he does not perform in. “I’ve increasingly got into the idea that there are people who’ll do things better than me,” he says, with an off-hand self-deprecation that seems characteristic. Though presumably it would also be difficult to commute to the Arcola from Taiwan.

Writing on the other side of the world seems to suit the direction Basden is looking to go in; for one thing, he reads none of the press Holes is receiving, the plan being, “once the run’s finished and I’m back in London, to sort of read everything that there is to read about it then”. So, good for distance in every sense of the word, “but also from a writing point of view, no-one contacts you until about this time of day,” meaning 5pm for him, 9am UK-time. “So it’s um, yeah, you do get a lot of time, it’s good… It’s not the only reason to go.”

Holes is at the Arcola until 9 August. For more information and tickets, visit the Arcola’s website.