Patrick Marber (October 1999)
Closer
Interview with Patrick Marber
by Charles Spencer (7 October 1999)
Syndicated Press Interview
When Patrick Marber finished his play Closer he thought it would run for about three months in the Cottesloe, the smallest of the National Theatre's three auditoriums. It did rather better than that.
It transferred first from the Cottesloe to the National's larger Lyttelton Theatre, and then to the West End. It has had a sixth month run on Broadway and has played in 50 other countries all over the world. Now it is setting off on its first regional tour of Britain, visiting Oxford, Malvern, Milton Keynes, Bath, Sheffield, Warwick and Poole between September 29 and December 11, and also travelling to the Czech Republic and Russia.
“I thought my first play Dealer's Choice was the commercial one and that Closer was my 'personal project' as they say in the States. It just goes to show how wrong you can be,” said Marber over lunch at the National Theatre's restaurant. “It's two-and-a-half years now since it first opened and this time it is being directed by Paddy Cunneen rather than me. So at last I've got some writing time. And I've really been missing my typewriter.”
Closer is a work that gets under its audience's skin, and it is certainly not for the emotionally squeamish. It focuses on four characters in the London of the 1990s, and follows them through four years of romantic turmoil. A journalist and a gamine young stripper meet and fall in love. So too do a photographer and a hospital doctor after a hilarious, and riotously obscene, case of mistaken identity on the Internet. Throughout Marber is alert to the cruel inequalities of love, as the characters change partners in what sometimes comes over like a modern reworking of Coward's Private Lives.
Both the language and the emotions have a no-holds-barred intensity. It is a play, in the poet WB Yeats's great phrase, set in 'the foul rag-and-bone-shop of the heart', and it seems to have been written by a man who has drunk desire down to its last bitter dregs, learnt that love can hurt and scar as much as it consoles and heals. So I asked Marber just how autobiographical Closer was.
“The trite answer is that everything is true but none of it happened. It is emotionally true, but the events, the plotting, the narrative, isn't true of my life, though I've experienced most of the emotions experienced by the characters in the play. When you're in your early 20s your love life seems to explode every 20 minutes or so. By the time you've reached your thirties, it is every five or ten years. Jealousy taps you on the shoulder and says 'remember me?' Ditto infidelity. To some members of the audience it's a horrible reminder of what they've been through. To others, who are going through this stuff at the same time as they are watching the play, there is a strong element of recognition. I've had letters from people saying, 'You've written my life, how did you know?' ”
One of the fascinating things about the play is that its churning emotional violence is contained within a framework of great elegance. The language may be crude, but the construction is meticulous.
“The idea was always to create something that has a formal beauty into which you could shove all this anger and fury. I hoped the dramatic power of the play would rest on that tension between elegant structure – the underlying plan is that you see the first and last meeting of every couple in the play – and inelegant emotion.”
Marber is unusual among playwrights in that he has come to the theatre after success on both radio and television. After reading English at Oxford he became a stand-up comic for several years, and received his big break when Armando Ianucci asked him to join the team of the satirical radio show On The Hour. From there he became involved in some of the finest comedy of the nineties, including The Day Today and the great Knowing Me, Knowing You starring Steve Coogan as the chat show host from hell, Alan Partridge.
He says writing collaboratively on these shows gave him the confidence to believe he might be able to write a play on his own. He's loved the theatre since studying Terence Rattigan's The Winslow Boy at school, aged 10, and at a time when many in the chattering classes like nothing better than denigrating live theatre he defends it vigorously.
“Theatre is how I first encountered art on any level. I used to go with my parents and loved it, I was in school plays, and I started reading plays before I started reading novels. I'll defend it to the hilt. When theatre is good it is fabulous.”
He admits that his progress as a dramatist appears to have been charmed. He developed his first play, Dealer's Choice, at the National Theatre's Studio, where it greatly impressed the NT's then director Richard Eyre. It helped, says Marber, that Eyre was a fan of Knowing Me, Knowing You.
Few writers get their first show put on at the National. Fewer still get to direct them, but Marber did just that at Eyre's invitation. Since then, as well as directing six different casts in Closer, he's also directed work by Craig Raine, Dennis Potter and David Mamet.
“When I look back I can't believe I was so stupid as to direct Dealer's Choice. The only thing I'd directed before was Steve Coogan's show at the Edinburgh Festival. But Richard Eyre took a punt on me and as well as giving me another string to my bow I've learnt a hell of a lot as a writer from directing. And it suits me to be a writer/director. I am by nature quite solitary and directing forces me into some level of communication with other people.”
There is an engaging touch of Eeyore-like gloom about Patrick Marber. He suffered clinical depression in his late teens and in his early twenties he became a compulsive gambler. His life is now on a more even keel. He shares a flat in London's Smithfield area with the actress Debra Gillett and a West Highland terrier called Riley; he still gambles occasionally but it's for fun now and he says he's graduated into a kind of 'benign melancholia'.
“But I'm the sort of person who, if certain structures topple, it could all go horribly wrong. It's one of the reasons I don't do drugs. One sniff and I'd go all the way. I was like that with gambling and I'd be like that with drinking if the lunchtime drink became a bottle rather than a glass. I'm constantly having to be vigilant with a depressive tendency, an addictive tendency. A couple of flop plays, a death in the family, and it could all collapse.”
Marber, now 35 and at work on his third play, is in my view the finest British dramatist of his generation and I sincerely hope things continue to go right for him. There's one consoling thought though. Even if it all went wrong, I'm sure he would get a damn fine play out of it. Cruel self-laceration is one of his specialities as a writer.
Charles Spencer is Theatre Critic of the Daily Telegraph and the British Press Awards Critic of the Year.
Go to Platform Papers for transcripts of interviews from some of our Platforms.
