Patrick Marber still winces at the less-than-flattering reviews he clocked up while touring the UK with David Mamet's Speed the Plow as one of the cast, "just to see what it was like". As a fresh-out-of-the-slips playwright, author of the phenomenally successful Dealer's Choice and Closer, his previous professional theatre reviews were variations on the theme of "this-man-is-a-genius".
"It was rough. But I kind of thought, well, this is good, now I know what it's like for my actors. Very rarely does an actor in one of my productions get a bad review but very occasionally it happens, and now I know how it feels and I can go into the dressing room and pick them up off the floor and say, `I really do understand how upsetting it is'. It's a good piece of emotional information to have acquired."
The former stand-up comic, winner of an Edinburgh Festival Perrier Award for directing Steve Coogan's one-man show in 1987, and subsequent winner of numerous West End and Broadway gongs, Marber already has a wide repertoire of emotional information stashed away. As Charles Spencer, critic with the Daily Telegraph wrote of Closer when it opened in London in 1997, "he gets right down to what Yeats described as `the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart'. Anyone who has loved and lost, anyone who has experienced infidelity or felt love die, will watch this play with stomach-churning pangs of recognition." It is certainly not for the emotionally squeamish.
Nor, it turns out, are such turbulent and destructive emotions limited to English-speaking audiences, or northern cultures. Although set in a London that is very real (the park in which several key scenes are set is where Marber walked his dog when writing the play), and written in a contemporary idiom that continues to shock, Closer has demonstrated a staggering universality, having already played in over 50 countries - including six months in New York - and is currently playing in Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Germany, Iceland, New Zealand and California.
Marber counts them off on his fingers as he speaks, still slightly in awe of what he has achieved. He remembers a particularly "wonderful and amazing" production in Stockholm. "I was really proud to sit there and watch it, and think `Wow, I'm really proud of having written this. I'm in Stockholm and it's in Swedish. And it's very exciting'." Marber's stupid-boy-in-big-town expression belongs to the Alan Partridge school of delivery - hardly surprising as this was where he started.
Although Patrick Marber had wanted to write for the theatre since he was a small boy, when he left Oxford, where he studied English, he says he didn't have a play in him and kind of "digressed into comedy for 10 years really".
Marber's plays are not comedies as such, although the comedy years have left their mark and he acknowledges that the comedy could be the engine that drives them.
The time spent working on joke-a-minute shows was, in any event, good discipline "because in comedy you really can't waste words. You have to get to the jokes very quickly and then keep the jokes coming. The whole purpose of comedy is to make people laugh, and you learn very quickly that verbosity isn't a very good way to deliver. I don't regret the years spent doing comedy and I am still proud of having been one of the creators of Alan Partridge and being involved in The Day Today and all that stuff. I think it was good."
The problem with writing at such a pace, Marber admits, is that, on some level, you become "a vulture on your own life". As for Closer, he describes it as being "highly personal, but not about me". Although the play has been hailed as a brutal indictment of men's capacity for betrayal and cowardice, Marber assures me that women are capable of equally "dim" behaviour. "The most disturbing thing to me is to be considered against men. Because I'm so not. I'm terribly male. And the last thing you ever want to be as a writer is any kind of spokesman, any kind of representation, because it diminishes your work while you're always trying to enlarge your position. Journalism/criticism tells me I've written a play about men and women, but for me I haven't. I've written this play about these characters I've invented out of my head, who are vaguely people I know, or versions of them collapsed into each other and versions of myself, splashed about the place."
Yet "splashed", suggesting some kind of amoebic shapelessness, is never an adjective one would use in describing Marber's tautly written work. His mentors are Pinter, Mamet and Stoppard. All are key influences as much for their thinking about the theatre, he says, as for as their writing. "In terms of the rigour of their aesthetic, the discipline of their work. I always tend to prefer classically or elegantly structured writing to free flowing realism. But that is my taste in music and literature and painting as well. Ideally I like Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, which is kind of figurative but tending towards the abstract."
Both Dealer's Choice and Closer were honed into their present shape during the rehearsal process after Marber was commissioned to write the plays by Richard Eyre, director of the National Theatre, under a scheme which allowed them to be workshopped. "I rewrite extensively in rehearsal and it's a lot easier to achieve than if you have some nice director who wants to protect the actors from having too many rewrites. Whereas if I'm the director I can take a view as to whether they can take any more changes or not." In all probability it will be the same with Marber's third play, as yet unfinished. "It just gives me more creative freedom as a writer if I direct my own material, I have found. But I'm always very relieved after I've directed the first production, because then it's out of my hands. Other people can direct it, I'm delighted."
Not that he entirely washes his hands of his plays. For the forthcoming production at the Peacock, although he has not attended rehearsals, he has enjoyed meeting everyone and answering questions.
"The director Simon McGill is a lovely bloke, we've had good meetings and I've enjoyed talking to him about the play, but it's always going to be his vision of the play and I look forward to seeing it. Because he's a really smart guy." In the meantime he's happy to answer any questions, from cast or director, "when things come up" - such as the meaning of individual lines. Not that he will always know the answer. But, he says, that's his creative prerogative.
"I'm a free spirit and I demand the right to change my mind all the time and to be a flibbertigibbet, because I think the reason I'm a writer is that I want freedom. I don't want to have to get up in the morning and do things I don't want to do. I don't want to have to work in an office and being a writer gives me that freedom. It's one of the reasons I wanted to be a writer from when I was about eight. I didn't like going to school every day. And I knew I didn't want in the future to do `a job'. Because I would see my father getting up the same time I was, putting a suit on, drudging off to work - sometimes in a good mood, sometimes in a bad - but basically he was going to work and I was going to school. We were both wearing our uniforms, both carrying out bags with our stuff in them, and it felt like the same kind of shit. And I thought how do I get out of this? And I thought I wanted to be a footballer or a fireman, they seemed like good options. But when I was in my adolescence I discovered literature and these writers. That seems OK, you can get up late.
"Really the animus of my life has been my need for sleep and to sleep the hours that I demand. There's a lot to be said for it, and I don't think one should ever underestimate, as a writer's motivation, the simple desire to live in one's pyjamas."
Closer by Patrick Marber is previewing at the Peacock Theatre, Dublin, and opens on Wednesday