At the start of the century, when he was directing Michael Gambon in a revival of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker, Patrick Marber sat down for a glass of wine with the nervous playwright. The opening night performance was about to begin and Pinter told him he was worried that the critics wouldn’t like the play. Marber couldn’t believe it. He told Pinter that, yes, the critics might not like the production, but they were sure to like the play. It was a long-established masterpiece after all.
“Harold said, ‘Do you really think so? Oh, thank you very much.’ And I realised I’d never properly told him what a great play I thought it was. I thought he knew. I hadn’t realised that even the great Harold wanted his director to love his play.”
It’s not a mistake that Marber — a comic turned playwright turned screenwriter turned (in his words) “semi-pro director” — made again. When he worked with Tom Stoppard, first in 2016 on a revival of his play Travesties and then in 2019 on his most recent play, Leopoldstadt, he made sure that Stoppard knew what a fan of the plays he was. And he meant it, even if he also asked Stoppard for more nips and tucks to those plays than directors had asked for before. And when, more recently, Marber talked with Marius von Mayenburg, the German writer of Nachtland, the satirical comedy Marber is staging at the Young Vic in south London, he made sure to express his love for it.
“We all need a pat on the back,” he says. And, yes, he enjoyed getting his own last summer when he won best director at the Tony awards on Broadway for Leopoldstadt, Stoppard’s story of a Viennese Jewish family living through the arrivals of the Nazis. “It’s really hard to win a Tony, like it’s really hard to win an Oscar. You need so much luck. There is so much competition. You feel blessed.” Marber, 59, a jovially furrowed presence as we sit in a Young Vic anteroom, gives a rueful smile. “For a night, anyway.”
After that, work begins again. Nachtland is the story of siblings who find a painting by Adolf Hitler in their late father’s attic. The sister wants to sell it. The brother wants to keep it as a memento of their father. His Jewish wife wants to destroy it. “It has uncomfortable moments. But you watch it with a smile. It doesn’t feel anything like directing Leopoldstadt, which was sad and upsetting.”
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He went to see Nachtland when it was performed at the Schaubühne in Berlin last year. “There was some laughter, some wincing, but I don’t think it’s a wincer for the Young Vic.” He thinks we will feel less implicated than the German audience was by the tough questions it asks of the legacy of Nazism. So why do it? “Oh, because it’s about right-wingery. It’s about fascism. It’s about liberal hypocrisy. It takes swipes at the left, the right, the centre.” He is not unusually motivated, though, to direct a play that addresses antisemitism. “As a Jew, I think antisemitism has been pertinent at any time in the last 2000 years.”
Nachtland follows fast after Pandemonium, Armando Iannucci’s satirical play that recast the events of the pandemic in mock-Jacobean verse. That marked the first time Marber had worked with Iannucci since they made their names in the Nineties working on the radio news satire On the Hour, which became the television news satire The Day Today, which led to the Alan Partridge spoof chat show Knowing Me, Knowing You.
“Armando changed my life. Everyone talks about a lucky break — well, that was mine. And so if he’d asked me to direct jottings from his journal I’d have done it. I felt I owed him. And I was really pleased with what we did.”
Marber grew up in Wimbledon, the older of two boys. He went to the independent schools St Paul’s and Cranleigh before studying English at Oxford. After that he earned his living as a stand-up comic, starting out at the same time as Jack Dee, Jo Brand and Eddie Izzard. “And that was as good, if not better an education than studying English literature, for a playwright. You get to hear the audience, you get to hear how you get the laugh.”
He had gone to Paris to write a novel but was getting nowhere with it when he got the call from Iannucci. He had written sketches for the Radio 4 satire Week Ending when Iannucci was its producer. Now Iannucci wanted Marber to join Chris Morris, Steve Coogan, Rebecca Front, Doon Mackichan and David Schneider in the team making On the Hour.
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The Day Today and Knowing Me, Knowing You made Marber a famous face. He pulled out of writing for Partridge after that but, as co-creators with Coogan, he and Iannucci get “a bit of pocket money” every time something is done with the character. “Which is very nice of Steve.” Mind you, he’s still waiting for his complimentary copy of the latest Partridge book, Big Beacon. “I’m a fan.”
He left comedy because his playwriting career was taking off. He still has the fax from the National Theatre’s boss of the time, Richard Eyre, saying that he wanted to put on Dealer’s Choice, Marber’s first play, inspired by the writer’s poker habit. Thirty years later it is on the wall of his study at his home in Soho. “I got really lucky. I knew my subject.”
He mined his love life for the follow-up, Closer, which opened at the National in 1997 before going to the West End and Broadway and becoming a film. “One of the reasons I write so few plays is that I can only really write from the absolute heart. If I can write another two or three plays before I die I’ll be happy.”
The only two original plays to come since Closer are Howard Katz in 2001, about a showbiz agent, and The Red Lion in 2015, inspired by Marber’s time helping to run Lewes Football Club. But screenwriting has long been his bread and butter. He and his actress wife, Debra Gillett, have three children, aged 22, 20 and 18. “Which is still quite expensive.” So he will be back to writing for the rest of 2024. He is adapting for the screen Peter Cameron’s novel What Happens at Night. Before that, The Critic, his adaptation of Anthony Quinn’s novel Curtain Call, starring Ian McKellen and Gemma Arterton, will be out.
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Does success in other fields make him worry less about struggling with his plays? “No, it still drives me mad. I love all the things I do but when I’m writing a play I think that’s the real job.” Does playwriting offer a sense of control he can’t get otherwise, perhaps? This prompts a grim laugh. “It sure doesn’t feel like control. It’s guesswork and darkness and a torch. You write two lines of dialogue and you think you’re a god. And then you stare at a blank page for five hours. It’s very up and down.”
During lockdown he was diagnosed with ADHD. It made sense to him: he had always struggled with deadlines, always needed six hours to do two hours’ work, keeps his office in a state he describes as “Dickensian”. He has a prescription for drugs to manage it, but still hasn’t taken the plunge. Maybe he will after Nachtland, he says.
Meanwhile, maybe it’s the ADHD diagnosis, maybe it’s his age — “once your kids call you an old f*** you kind of have to accept you are” — but these days he allows himself to feel blessed. He’s just finished a day’s rehearsal with a cast that includes Jane Horrocks and John Heffernan. “And all I ever wanted to do was laze around and have fun with nice people like this. How nice to be in a room with brilliant actors. And then a guy from a newspaper comes to talk to me, about me. I’ve dreamt of things like this since my twenties. How pathetic that my ego needs that. But it does.” He chuckles, then passes on a story Pinter told him about going up to a couple reading a rave review of his latest play on the Tube to tell them who he was. “We’re back where we started.”
Nachtland is at the Young Vic, London, to April 20, youngvic.org
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