Patrick Marber
‘I’ve come out to myself as having depression
‘Quite possibly every Jew on the planet has an exit strategy,” says Patrick Marber. “I do. I’m off to New York if it gets too heavy.” On a cold morning in north London, I’m having a distressing conversation about anti-semitism, and the possibility that the UK might become “unliveable in” for its Jewish community, with one of British theatre’s finest writer/directors. He hopes it won’t come to that.
Marber, who’s about to direct Tom Stoppard’s hugely anticipated new play Leopoldstadt, about Jewish Vienna before the Nazis, is not prepared to label the recent upsurge “creeping” anti-semitism, though – “I grew up in the Seventies, it was always there.” He’s 55; he remembers the National Front marches that led to street battles with fascists, “the desecration of graves, graffiti – Jews have lived with that from day one”, but he hadn’t expected it to reappear on the Left.
On the fault line where criticism of Israel meets race hatred, alongside which the chasm in the Labour party has opened up, he says, “I certainly think that anti-zionism has sort of folded into anti-semitism.” On whether Corbyn is himself an antisemite, he offers a carefully considered, “I very much hope not.”
Marber identifies as a liberal. Arriving in a zip-up coat, he rather resembles a non-league football manager (he still plays twice a week when he can). He’s understated, dressed down, lightly stubbled. Before he announced himself as a playwright with a startling new voice in 1995 with Dealer’s Choice and Closer (1997), Marber had been a stand-up and had a hand in the genesis of Alan Partridge. He pushed for Steve Coogan’s DJ and presenter to be trapped in a motel (“I always wanted to torture Alan”). He’s gone on to write acclaimed plays, such as Don Juan in Soho (2006) and The Red Lion (about a non-league football manager) in 2015. He’s also a successful screenwriter, Oscarnominated for his adaptation of Notes on a Scandal in 2007.
“It’s very, very hard to make a living as a playwright now,” he says, “to only write plays. But then again, Tom didn’t only write plays. He’s written a ton of screenplays.” (Stoppard, of course, won an Oscar for Shakespeare in Love, but was also the uncredited “script polisher” on numerous films, such as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, of which Spielberg later said, “Tom is pretty much responsible for every line of dialogue.”) “I can’t think of anyone who can make a living as a playwright… maybe Caryl Churchill. I think those days are gone where if you write a hit play that takes London by storm, it will automatically be done all over the world.” It happened with Closer but, Marber notes, “lightning doesn’t strike that many times in a career”.
But Marber has long been admired as a director, too; he made a splash with his 2016 production of Stoppard’s Travesties (1974) in London and on Broadway, where he was nominated for a Tony. He’s six weeks into rehearsals for Leopoldstadt, Stoppard’s first play in five years and perhaps the most personal work of a 60-year-plus career. If its working script is anything to go by, it will be dazzling, funny and heartbreaking. I was in floods of tears reading it.
It traces the lives of an extended Jewish family in Vienna from 1899 to 1955, beginning in a period of optimism, which saw a flowering in the culture of that city – when Freud was developing his theories about the unconscious, and Klimt and Mahler were creating great art and music – ending on the far side of the Holocaust. “We know more than the characters,” says Marber. “We know what’s going to happen.”
The play has its roots in the now 82-year-old Stoppard’s discovery in his 50s that he was Jewish. Born Tomas Straussler in Zlin, Czechoslovakia in 1937, he had escaped as an infant with his father, mother and elder brother to Singapore as the Germans invaded, but had to flee again, to India in 1941, before the Japanese occupied the island. His father was killed trying to leave Singapore in 1942. Stoppard’s mother married again, to a British army officer, Major Kenneth Stoppard, who brought his new family to England, where Tomas grew up with a new name. It wasn’t until a Czech relative visited London and drew a family tree for him that he began to appreciate his true history. He wrote about it in 1999, recalling that meeting in 1994, when he asked her, “Sarka, were we Jewish? … I mean, how Jewish were we?” The great playwright had no idea that all of his grandparents had died in or on the way to concentration camps.
I wonder if working on the play had compelled Marber to look more deeply at his own ancestors’ experiences. “A strange thing happened to me,” he says. “My father died in the summer of 2018, and in April 2019, when I knew I was going to be doing the play, I started looking at my family tree, the one that my father had written out for me. There was the dead man’s handwriting, and there were the people [beside whom] he’d written, ‘murdered by the Nazis’, and I was suddenly terribly moved… When my father was alive, and he would want me to look at the family tree that he’d drawn up, that he was proud of, I was totally uninterested. And I feel very sad that my dad isn’t around for me to go, actually, in the end, it did matter… thank you. It’s a regret.”
He felt his Eastern European heritage. “There’s a whole bunch of Marbers who came from Poland and Russia and were in the Warsaw Ghetto and died in camps,” he says.
Leopoldstadt, he confesses, is even harder to direct than Travesties: 41 actors, 15 children among them and multiple time frames. I want to know how he and Stoppard work together. Marber has said he directs him with “Greyfriars Bobby-like loyalty”. Stoppard likes to be part of rehearsals. “I like him there when I’ve got a scene on its feet, rather than when I’m struggling with it,” Marber admits. “Sometimes I’ll say, ‘Tom, I just need three or four days alone with the actors’. It is absolutely necessary to be able to hold the play up to scrutiny without the playwright there and be able to say, ‘Is that joke even funny?’”
I wonder if the dynamic between the two men has a darkness vs light quality. Marber has a dark side that makes its way into nearly all of his writing. “No,” he says. “I mean, Tom is every bit as dark as I am… We’re not that different temperamentally. Tom in his cups is a dark place.” He pauses, then adds, “although I wouldn’t say
Tom is depressive, whereas I am.”
I’d read about Marber’s experience of writer’s block when he was living in East Sussex with his wife, actress Debra Gillett, and their three sons. Since moving back to London, he looks back on his former struggle not as creative block but depression. “I have to be vigilant with myself when I get overloaded,” he says. “If I’ve taken on too much work, then I can feel the dog yelping. I’ve had a good four or five years… [but] the worst depressive period I’ve ever had was at the height of, as it were, success, when I had two plays [The Red Lion and Three Days in the Country] running at the National in the autumn of 2015. I took to my bed for a month.
“I’ve sort of come out to myself as suffering from depression. Even though my father was bipolar, it had never occurred to me that I might be depressed. I thought I was just not
Marber is six weeks into rehearsals for Stoppard’s new play. ‘It is a feat of engineering,’ he says
Before writing the script for ‘Fifty Shades’, he injured his back. ‘I was in agony, writing this sexy stuff’
very good at life. It was only really four or five years ago, that I sort of went, ‘This is clinical’, which was comforting. I think it’s always been with me. I can trace it back now.”
Overload is always possible, though. He’s just delivered a script to the BBC about a theatre critic in Thirties England, and is adapting a novel (he can’t name it), he’s written a film screenplay, and is 30 pages into a play “that I’ve had in my head since 2006”, set in the room of a private tutor he visited when he was doing his A-levels.
Famously, his screenplay of Fifty Shades was vetoed by the author. He laughs recalling how he’d put his back out “… and was sat there in agony trying to write this sexy stuff ”. It was “kind of racy”, he adds.
Rehearsals are about to start downstairs. He zips up his coat. I imagine him giving a tactics talk to the cast with chalk and blackboard. Doesn’t he feel nervous? “This play is a feat of engineering. It has layers, patterns, shapes, colours that emerge, vanish. I’ve got too much to do to feel nervous.” And with that he’s gone.