Patrick Marber, whose play, 'Closer', is now a star-studded film, tells Donald Clarke how kicking comedy and gambling improved his life
Patrick Marber, writer, actor, comedian, has something of the look of a sad hedgehog about him. A boxy man with downturned everything, he keeps his eyes focused on an intellectually rewarding square of carpet while answering intrusive questions about his complicated home life.
When I suggest we move on to talk about the work, he takes out a Silk Cut and breathes an adenoidal sigh of relief.
"Oh, thank God for that," he says.
Like Alan Bennett, John Osborne, Morrissey, Tony Hancock and others, Marber has always taken a very English delight in the comedy of everyday misery. His appearances in the landmark BBC comedy shows, The Day Today and Knowing Me, Knowing You - the programmes that introduced TV viewers to Alan Partridge - were coloured by surliness, irascibility and despair. The most famous line in his celebrated second play, Closer, now an excellent film by Mike Nichols, sees a cuckolded doctor upbraiding a rival for bleating about his broken heart.
"Ever seen a human heart?" Larry the dermatologist says. "It looks like a fist wrapped in blood."
With all this in mind, it comes as a surprise to hear that Marber believes himself to be pretty happy.
"Yes, I am content," he says. "I love my wife, I love my children, I have the life I always wanted. But, you know, as a writer there is always stuff you can dip your pen into."
Closer, a taut dissection of the sexual goings-on between four youngish adults, was conceived during a difficult time in the author's life. Given the play's consistently bitter tone, I dread to think what romantic atrocities inspired it.
"Well, I met my wife, who at the time was somebody else's wife," Marber says with a wry smirk. "And then, well, stuff happened. But the real thing that happened was that I went to a lap-dance club in Atlanta. I had never been to one before. So it was a combination of real life and things in my personal life and conversations with my friends who were then all not married and who all seemed to be looking for somebody."
First performed at the Royal National Theatre in 1997, Closer went on to become one of the signature British plays of the decade. There have been more than 150 productions throughout the world and Marber has had to live up to comparisons with David Mamet and Harold Pinter.
Such was the buzz around the piece, and so delicious are the four roles, that Nichols, director of The Graduate and Carnal Knowledge, had no trouble securing an A-list cast: Natalie Portman, Jude Law, Clive Owen and Julia Roberts. Impressively, none of the film's savagely profane dialogue seems to have been bowdlerised.
"People refuse to believe the relationship with the studio was as extraordinary as it was," Marber says. "Mike Nichols gave them movie stars, and that helped, I think. They understood they were going to get a film with this language in it."
One might have expected the arrival of Julia Roberts, who replaced a pregnant Cate Blanchett, to cause a few ructions.
"No, because she read the material first. I know the story is supposed to be that the studio tried to crush our art. You'd like to hear that Julia came on board and they all wanted it to turn mainstream, but I am afraid it just wasn't like that. I am afraid I just can't spin you that story. She read it and said I want to do this. She has a love life. She knows what it is like."
What it is like is cruel, vindictive and unforgiving. The games - contact sports - played between the four lovers in Closer make Dangerous Liaisons seem like It's A Knockout. Marberland is not a jolly place.
"Well, that's the love story I chose to tell," he says. "I wasn't writing a love story where things turned out right. I am aware that sometimes things do. They have for me."
WELL, YES, BUT it is only natural for audiences to try and divine some sort of world-view from a writer's work. And Closer does seem to contain grim news about the ultimate futility of good behaviour. Nobody in the play or film is rewarded for doing the right thing.
"I didn't feel jolly at the time," Marber says. "I never write generally, but people always want to extrapolate from the specific. I write very specifically. I didn't make these characters up to suggest that all women are like this. I am not saying that this is the way all men are."
Raised in middle-class Wimbledon - his dad was something in the city - Patrick Marber, now aged 40, seems to have had as uneventful a childhood as most suburban kids. After attending a minor public school and Oxford, where he studied English under Terry Eagleton, he decided to try his hand at stand-up comedy. Bizarrely, considering his Eeyore demeanour, he suggests that his early act had something of the dread Robin Williams about it.
"I knew I wasn't really a comic," he says. "I wanted to be a writer, but this was a very good opportunity to test my material. I lived with Jack Dee during the Edinburgh Fringe in 1989 and he was always working on his act. He was always in his room working and I would do anything to avoid thinking about my act. It was very clear to me then that he was a pro and I didn't really have what it takes."
Nonetheless, Marber's mostly improvised act somehow attracted the attention of the producer and writer Armando Iannucci, who, with comic talents such as Steve Coogan and David Schneider, was putting together a spoof news show, On the Hour, for BBC Radio 4. Marber identifies this as the first of two big breaks he has enjoyed in life. (The second came when Richard Eyre, then director of the National Theatre, commissioned his first play, Dealer's Choice.) On the Hour was followed by the even better TV version, The Day Today, and, most famously, Knowing Me, Knowing You, a chat show hosted by Coogan's hopeless sports reporter, Alan Partridge.
"What happened was that a sketch appeared one day for On the Hour with a character called Sports Reporter, written by Stewart Lee and Richard Herring, and it was just a very funny sports reporter doing, well, funny sports reporting," Marber says. "So Armando suggested Steve try it, and Alan was born."
So, who were the main inspirations?
"At the time there was a guy called Elton Welsby and he was always getting thrown into swimming pools by footballers and saying [comes over all Partridge] 'Oh, what a lovely bit of fun'. I think I can take credit for the idea of giving him his own chat show. He just made us laugh so much."
Marber admits that, despite the fact that his career was prospering, he was still somewhat disenchanted with the universe and that he released that frustration through the staggeringly irresponsible gambling that was to inspire the poker-themed Dealer's Choice. Would "My Gambling Hell" serve as a good heading for this chapter in his life?
"Well, yes, but hell is relative," Marber says. "When I was in my early 20s I was in gambling hell because I would gamble everything I had. It was a nasty time in my life and I wasted two years of university life going off to Archer Street in Soho and losing all my money. The problem was the second time I went I won about 800 quid and that was half a year's grant. I thought great!"
He pauses to shudder at his foolishness: "I had a system." If I were an American I would ask what he felt was missing from his life at this stage.
"Yeah, but you still want to know the answer to that question?" he says dryly. "Actually it is a fair question. I think people do things for a reason and what was missing was that I wasn't writing. I wanted to create stuff. I wanted to be a published author and I wasn't doing it. Everything changed when I wrote Dealer's Choice. I was engrossed and engaged in the thing that I really wanted. Writing about gambling got it out of my system."
So he is a reformed man?
"I still play poker in a regular Tuesday night game. I play online poker and I go to casinos and I have many gambling friends - some of whom, would you believe, are journalists. It is still a part of my life. But it is my hobby now, not my whole life."
Dealer's Choice, the first debut play at the National to be directed by its author, proved to be a significant success and Closer was a bona fide smash. Since then he has received brickbats for Howard Katz, a drama about a theatrical agent, and further acclaim for his Strindberg adaptation, After Miss Julie. Later this year we will see David Mackenzie's film of Patrick McGrath's gothic novel, Asylum, featuring a much-praised script by Marber ("It makes Closer seem like a vicarage tea party"). Somehow, after working out the messy romantic stuff mentioned earlier, he has also found time to marry actress Debra Gillett and sire two sons.
Life seems to have worked out OK. Hemingway once said something to the effect that all you needed to be a writer was an unhappy childhood. Now that Marber is reasonably content (he nervously touches the surface of the wooden table in front of him) will he find it harder to find inspiration?
"Oh, there's always stuff there, because anyone who has reached the age of 40 intact has material within him. Yes, I am content as a person, but that doesn't make me content as a writer. When you are a writer there are always two separate people within you."
Closer opens on Friday