They’re back! Max Bialystock (Andy Nyman) and Leo Bloom (Marc Antolin) in the Patrick Marber–directed revival of *The Producers.*

Bunkers on Broadway

The playwright Patrick Marber has long struggled with tackling the Holocaust onstage. But now he’s happily directing a revival of Mel Brooks’s The Producers—complete with high-kicking storm troopers

By Alice Jones

Patrick Marber — star of The Day Today, co-creator of Alan Partridge, playwright of the era-defining Closer and, most recently, the Tony Award-winning director of Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt — would rather you didn’t call him any of those things. “I really think of myself as a failed writer who’s had some success. And a quite successful director who hasn’t completely failed yet,” he says, taking a furtive puff on his vape. “I live in a weird world of not really feeling like a pro at anything.”

Certainly, at 60 with piercing blue eyes imprisoned behind owlish giant glasses, silver hair bristling, he has the air of a man constantly surprised by where his career has taken him. Not least the fact that for the past few years his work has acquired a particular focus. Or, as he puts it drily, “I’ve been doing Nazis nonstop.”