Patrick Marber
Created | Updated Nov 12, 2003
Background
Patrick Marber was born on 19 September 1964. Marber was more well known for stand up career and TV programmes written with such names as Steve Coogan, Armando Ianucci, Chris Morris and Richard Herring on programmes such as The Day Today (1994), Knowing Me Knowing You with Alan Partridge (1995). He co-created Steve Coogan's most famous character, Alan Partridge and worked with Coogan for many years on the stand up circuit. This is where the humour later found in his plays developed.
Comedy and style
His plays had deeply tragic characters in situations that are far from appealing, however Marber's wit and irony manifest themselves in his plays. For example in this short extract from Closer.
Dan: Didn't fancy my sandwiches?
Alice: I don't eat fish.
Dan: Why not?
Alice: Fish piss in the sea.
Dan: So do children.
Alice: I don't eat children either.
However he does sometimes deal with comic situation such as Dan's "seduction" of Larry over the internet with Dan posing as woman, this uses old comedy techniques of misrecognition. However behind his dryness he gives an impression of vulnerability, he leaves a sense of old hurts in his plays. He is an obsessive re-writer and says “Delete, is my favourite key”.
Dealer’s Choice and Catharsis
Marber chooses to write from personal experience, as a sort of catharsis of his gambling demons. Marber's addiction to gambling led to his first play "Dealer's Choice" (1995). The play examines men's attitudes towards other men, in a close situation, and he uses, insults, chatter, and most of the game playing, to subsititue real emotion and the situations between colleagues, parent to child. Money is a big symbol in the play and it's discussed in various ways, one character discusses a friend of his who has won the lottery, one character owes another a substantial amount of money.
Closer
"There is no such thing as an honest relationship. The best you can hope for is an honest relationship with yourself." This was the basis on which Marber's second play "Closer" (1997) was written. Closer is comedy drama about dead end relationships in the 1990's. Once again Marber is using personal situations as a jump off point for his play. “In the summer of 1996, a bit of life happened to me. Romantic stuff, a series of events in my personal life. I thought this is good stuff, I can use it.” When asked how autobiographical Closer was, Marber replied, “The trite answer is that everything is true but none of it happened. It is emotionally true but the events, the plotting, the narrative, isn’t true of my life, though I’ve experienced most of the emotions experienced by the characters in the play. When you’re in your early 20’s your love life seems to explode every 20 minutes or so. By the time you’ve reached your thirties, it is every five or ten years. Jealousy taps you on the shoulder and say “remember me?” Ditto infidelity. To some members of the audience it’s a horrible reminder of what they’ve been through. To others, who are going through this stuff the same time as they are watching the play, there is a strong element of recognition. I’ve had letters from people saying, “you’ve written my life, how did you know?”.
In Closer he uses extremely fast scene changes, mixes with loud music and bright lights, perhaps reflecting the quickness of the 1990’s. Closer is quite a serious play, despite it’s great deal of wit and sarcasm in it. There is however one scene that is pure comedy, the internet chatroom scene in which both male leads meet in an internet chatroom and Larry (A doctor) is seduced by Dan (pretending to be a woman). This scene is projected on to large computer screens, and is otherwise silent apart from phone interruptions.
The play has a no-holds barred feeling on the emotions, the drama and the language. Marber’s realistic use of language shows how much theatre audiences have matured.
There is a sense that the play’s structure is deliberately elegant. “The idea was always to create something that has a formal beauty into which you could shove all this anger and fury. I hoped the dramatic power of the play would rest on that tension between elegant structure – the underlying plan is that you see the first and last meeting of every couple in the play – and inelegant emotion.”
Patrick Marber was born on 19 September 1964. Marber was more well known for stand up career and TV programmes written with such names as Steve Coogan, Armando Ianucci, Chris Morris and Richard Herring on programmes such as The Day Today (1994), Knowing Me Knowing You with Alan Partridge (1995). He co-created Steve Coogan's most famous character, Alan Partridge and worked with Coogan for many years on the stand up circuit. This is where the humour later found in his plays developed.
Comedy and style
His plays had deeply tragic characters in situations that are far from appealing, however Marber's wit and irony manifest themselves in his plays. For example in this short extract from Closer.
Dan: Didn't fancy my sandwiches?
Alice: I don't eat fish.
Dan: Why not?
Alice: Fish piss in the sea.
Dan: So do children.
Alice: I don't eat children either.
However he does sometimes deal with comic situation such as Dan's "seduction" of Larry over the internet with Dan posing as woman, this uses old comedy techniques of misrecognition. However behind his dryness he gives an impression of vulnerability, he leaves a sense of old hurts in his plays. He is an obsessive re-writer and says “Delete, is my favourite key”.
Dealer’s Choice and Catharsis
Marber chooses to write from personal experience, as a sort of catharsis of his gambling demons. Marber's addiction to gambling led to his first play "Dealer's Choice" (1995). The play examines men's attitudes towards other men, in a close situation, and he uses, insults, chatter, and most of the game playing, to subsititue real emotion and the situations between colleagues, parent to child. Money is a big symbol in the play and it's discussed in various ways, one character discusses a friend of his who has won the lottery, one character owes another a substantial amount of money.
Closer
"There is no such thing as an honest relationship. The best you can hope for is an honest relationship with yourself." This was the basis on which Marber's second play "Closer" (1997) was written. Closer is comedy drama about dead end relationships in the 1990's. Once again Marber is using personal situations as a jump off point for his play. “In the summer of 1996, a bit of life happened to me. Romantic stuff, a series of events in my personal life. I thought this is good stuff, I can use it.” When asked how autobiographical Closer was, Marber replied, “The trite answer is that everything is true but none of it happened. It is emotionally true but the events, the plotting, the narrative, isn’t true of my life, though I’ve experienced most of the emotions experienced by the characters in the play. When you’re in your early 20’s your love life seems to explode every 20 minutes or so. By the time you’ve reached your thirties, it is every five or ten years. Jealousy taps you on the shoulder and say “remember me?” Ditto infidelity. To some members of the audience it’s a horrible reminder of what they’ve been through. To others, who are going through this stuff the same time as they are watching the play, there is a strong element of recognition. I’ve had letters from people saying, “you’ve written my life, how did you know?”.
In Closer he uses extremely fast scene changes, mixes with loud music and bright lights, perhaps reflecting the quickness of the 1990’s. Closer is quite a serious play, despite it’s great deal of wit and sarcasm in it. There is however one scene that is pure comedy, the internet chatroom scene in which both male leads meet in an internet chatroom and Larry (A doctor) is seduced by Dan (pretending to be a woman). This scene is projected on to large computer screens, and is otherwise silent apart from phone interruptions.
The play has a no-holds barred feeling on the emotions, the drama and the language. Marber’s realistic use of language shows how much theatre audiences have matured.
There is a sense that the play’s structure is deliberately elegant. “The idea was always to create something that has a formal beauty into which you could shove all this anger and fury. I hoped the dramatic power of the play would rest on that tension between elegant structure – the underlying plan is that you see the first and last meeting of every couple in the play – and inelegant emotion.”
