Reputations go before people, it’s true, but they also get overtaken by them
and left for dead. The surprising thing – one of many – about the writer
Patrick Marber is that the second part of this process has yet to occur. To
hear people talk about him, you’d still think he was a monster of debt and
depravity, defending the rights of the dissolute with the wit of a
latter-day Wilde and the raging will of a posh Pinter.
The life of this reputation has just been reinflated by his version of
Molière’s Don Juan. It was set in modern London and although it didn’t
exactly endorse the rake’s morality, it gave his sheer commitment to
hedonism a distinct grandeur. Easy to assume a degree of autobiography in
someone creating so plausibly this tottering Colossus of Soho.
The fact is that Marber writes such lives pre-emptively, fending off the need
to live them himself, long before the arrival of such a crisis. But before I
meet him I don’t know about this, and so am stuck with the idea of a roguish
and unrepentant gambler, a handsome so-and-so proofed by cleverness, old
sporting prowess and Oxbridge class to round off some serious public
schooling.
The gap between this caricature and the man I meet is hilariously wide. His
presence is really quite compact, modest, wary, not quite owlish but
certainly bookish. He comes down the stairs from his East London flat to the
warehouse space of his office, lights a cigarette and insists on opening a
window. When I say he really needn’t bother, he insists, explaining that he
doesn’t want his habits to make me ill. The smoking is a poor show,
obviously, but the social concern disqualifies him at a stroke from
bounderhood.
Marber, who is 42, came to prominence in the mid-Nineties with the play
Dealer’s Choice. He had in effect researched this through his own early life
as a compulsive gambler. Richard Eyre, then director of the National
Theatre, gave him his head with the project, and the young author became the
only playwright to have directed his own first play at the National. Then
came the even more successful Closer, about the entangled sex lives of four
people in their thirties (which became a film starring Jude Law and Julia
Roberts). He wrote it in part as a result of meeting and falling in love
with the actress Debra Gillett, who now lives with him and their three young
children in the flat upstairs from here. At some point along this route he
was being acclaimed as the next Stoppard or Pinter. True, he could do
flamboyant and he could do edgy, but his people seemed to be moving in some
more recognisable place, their demons of gambling, or drink or sex more
plainly identifiable. The important thing was that he was bringing in
younger audiences in sufficient numbers to sustain the argument that
thoughtful theatre had a buoyant future. He was also being engaged to write
screenplays – the latest, Notes on a Scandal, from the Zoë Heller novel,
starring Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett (above), has earned him a Bafta
nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Here we run smack into another of those “pre-emptive” characters whom he wants
to write rather than become; or even whom he wants to write in order not to
become. Heller’s Barbara is a fearsome concoction, both dependable senior
teacher and manipulative wrecker. She becomes obsessed by her new colleague,
Sheba, herself sexually obsessed by a male pupil. Out rolls an unsparing
story about the kinds of damage that can be done by desire both in its
indulged and its suppressed state. And here Marber is on enticing territory,
having experienced in his own way the truth of what he now portrays.
He was in his second year at Oxford, studying English, when he got into
gambling. “It was as if something had found me,” he says. “As if it had
tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Yes, it’s me, I’m it. In case you
wondered.’ I think part of the thing with gambling was that my father was,
and is, in the currency business, and impressed on me the importance of
money care, of not overspending. So I had found this cavalier habit; I had
heeded my father’s words of warning and now here was a way of unheeding them
in a very radical way.
“Also, don’t forget that behind every compulsive gambler is a great first win.
The night that my friend John took me to a casino for the first time, we
won. Eighty quid. The next week, at Charlie Chester’s in Archer Street, we
won £600. That was the killer, that second time. My student grant in a
single night.” From his description the compulsion was real enough while it
lasted. It just happened not to last that long, and before the end of his
twenties he was pretty much clear of it. He goes on to insist that his life
has not been interesting and, unless I am being very gullible, this is
neither a device nor a piece of ritual modesty. “Safe, conservative and
steady” are the words he uses of himself. They do seem at odds with past
evidence: apart from the gambling he took up the even riskier business of
stand-up comedy. Surely this is, or at least was, a man with a need to place
himself in hazard.
The full explanation is richer. “If you are young, just out of university,” he
says, “you cast a line to the far side of three years ahead, and you say to
yourself you are prepared to suffer death and humiliation to get to that
place. In my case the ambition was to be able to control a room with 200
people in it, and to make them laugh. And I learnt how to do it. It is not
hard if you have the will. I feel this with life in general. If you
coherently want it, you will do it.”
The stand-up stood him in good stead. Later, when he was living in Paris and
failing to write a novel, he got a call from Armando Iannucci, an old
friend, and soon after was back in London working on the Radio 4 series On
the Hour, the original habitat of Steve Coogan’s Alan Partridge. What he
remembers most vividly from his early comedy days was the wish to do
something where his degree and his relative privilege were of no value. “I
wanted to get into the ring and test myself in a place where those things
counted for nothing.”
One of two boys from the green suburbs of South London, he had been to St
Paul’s, the prestigious boys’ public school, then Cranleigh, in the Surrey
countryside, where he discovered running with the same sense of epiphany as
he later discovered other things. An inspirational sports master got into
him the notion of winning, and this is one appetite he has evidently never
lost.
If you were hard-line, you could say he hasn’t relinquished risk at all. His
next big job is the screenplay for Ian McEwan’s Saturday. Every time he
takes on a screenplay he lets half the agreed time elapse before getting
down to it. Very undergraduate, except that now his tutor figure is
Hollywood producer Scott Rudin rather than Wadham College’s Terry Eagleton.
“I can’t write anything unless I mean it,” he says. “It’s like it had to be
written, and has a vomited force to it. The core conflict in me is that I
fear I have a gravitational pull that is down and dark and I am fending it
off with the writing.”
Interesting to think that a writer with such a public is really coming up with
cautionary tales for his own consumption. It looks like a winning system at
the moment.
Notes on a Scandal is released on Friday
