Marber
As Patrick Marber sits in his old college, surrounded by attentive listeners and next to his old tutor, you might think the contented smile on his face was due to the pleasant familiarity of the circumstances in which he finds himself. However, it probably has more to do with the prospect of a free meal at Wadham’s high table that is to come after talking to the assorted audience of English students, aspiring writers, and admiring enthusiasts of his writing.
“I’m just here for the free meal,” he explains, “but don’t mind singing for my supper.” The wry and often self-conscious wit that colours much of what Marber says is a reminder of why he was so successful in his original career path of professional comic.
As a stand-up comedian in London, then later, co-writer and actor in such hits as The Day Today, Knowing Me, Knowing You and Paul and Pauline Calf’s Video Diaries, Marber first found fame and fortune through his productive partnership with Steve Coogan and Armando Ianucci. As he explains to me later, royalties from constant repeats of much of this early television work still make up a healthy portion of his income.
It is not for this comic work that Marber is best known, however, and as the writer of the plays Dealer’s Choice, Howard Katz, and most famously both the stage and screen versions of Closer, he has found that audiences have warmed to the darker side of his writing as much, if not more, than the lighter offerings with which he was previously associated.
It is the Oscar nominated screen version of Closer that has brought Marber fully into the spotlight, and it is this that he finds himself having to talk about, and often defend, most of all. Giving an starkly pessimistic picture of human relationships, male aggression and female submission, the piece has been accused of being misogynistic, misanthropic, and in the words of Mark Kermode, BBC 5 Live’s film critic, “Just a hateful film."
Marber disagrees: “I feel that the men in the play go through periods of the play feeling misogyny, but this doesn’t make the play misogynistic."
In fact, most of the fan mail I get about it is from women, asking, ‘How did you know? How did you know what it’s like to be a woman?’” Can he really claim that the play is not misanthropic in a wider sense, though, focusing on four characters with whom audiences have found it almost impossible to sympathise? “I can understand why people say that the characters are all horrible, but I really like them. They’re my friends."
To speak to Marber, it is difficult to see how such a bleak vision of humanity could have come from such a charming and charismatic man, one with a sharp wit, a ready grin, and most surprisingly, an apparently settled family life. “It was how I felt at the time. I had a particularly bleak feeling about where I was at. For me, it’s always about specifics. I’m not trying to make a bigger, bolder statement.
Now that I’m a married man with two kids and another on the way, Closer is only material. It’s no longer felt.” Life has not always been so rosy for Marber though.
His first attempt at writing came when he decided to leave the country to escape from a relationship, and found himself in Paris for six months, trying to write a book, because, “That’s where you go when you want to write a book, isn’t it?” It was here that he met an American girl, and though he never finished that book, and says he never will, the relationship with that girl was to become part of the inspiration behind writing the play, and specifically the character of Alice.
Apart from various disastrous relationships with women he appears to have gone through, he has also enjoyed an ambiguous relationship with his hobby of choice, picked up during his days at Wadham, playing poker. His addiction came to a crisis point when he lost £10,000 in one night, most of which, he explains, was borrowed cash. He says that he still gambles, but now to a reasonable level �" and of course is now able to do so using his own money.
Apart from his writing, Marber has now taken on the post of Cameron Mackintosh Visiting Professor of Contemporary Theatre at St Catz. This has seen him return to Oxford whenever he can get time, though he admits he wishes he was able to be in the city more often. He recounts the strange experience of walking back into Wadham hall (the free meal to which he was so much looking forward), but now being led up to high table with many of the tutors by whom he was once taught.
Stranger still, he says, is being called ‘Professor Marber’, though he admits a certain amount of pride on the rare occasions that people use his academic title. The post also brings him into contact with a new generation of Oxford undergraduates, who he says are more enthusiastic and switched on, relishing the Oxford experience far more than he, as a cynical Marxist literary critic, had felt himself able to.
Though the man who sits opposite me is clearly a happy, well-balanced individual, I can’t help but feel relieved that he has maintained some of this cynicism and appreciation of the darker side of human life and relationships in his writing. Without what he describes as the schizophrenia involved in being a writer (“A writer has two selves. The one who’s married, with children and a career, and the writer, or inner self, who might take a completely different view of life."), we might have missed out on some of the most important contemporary writing we have seen in recent years. As long as he doesn’t become as enthusiastic as this generation of undergraduates whom he claims to admire so much, theatre and film audiences have much to look forward to from Patrick Marber’s pen.
2nd Jun 2005