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.”
We are sitting in a chilly arts center in east London in the middle of winter. But inside the rehearsal room it is Springtime for Hitler once more. This month The Producers returns to the London stage for the first time in 20 years, with Marber at the helm. It is his first time directing a musical and he had to be vetted by Mel Brooks, the creator of both the 1967 film and the 2001 musical about the crooked producer Max Bialystock and his accountant pet, Leo Bloom who hatch a money-making scheme to stage a surefire flop — Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden — but they are undone when it becomes a hit.
The last production starred Nathan Lane and Lee Evans, ran for 920 performances in the West End and won three Olivier awards, including for best musical. This time, the swastika will dance across the bijou stage of the Menier Chocolate Factory, though you wouldn’t bet against a West End transfer in, well, springtime.
Marber is on a remarkable run of form: at the start of the new year he will have three shows running. As well as The Producers, there is What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank — a bracing exploration of Jewish identity, given a five-star review in The Times, that has just extended its run at the Marylebone Theatre — and in February he will open David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross on Broadway, with a fever dream of a cast led by Bob Odenkirk, Kieran Culkin and Bill Burr.
“I’ve gone deep into Jewish experience,” Marber says. “I knew eventually that as a Jewish writer-director I was going to have to, in some form, say my piece. I’d done my Jewish play, Howard Katz, which was about secular Judaism, and then Leopoldstadt arrived and I thought, well, I have to do this but I’m very scared of it.”
After Leopoldstadt, Stoppard’s tragic epic about a Jewish family living in Vienna through the rise of the Nazis, came Nachtland, a black comedy about two siblings who find an original Adolf Hitler painting in their late father’s loft. “That’s my territory now. It didn’t happen consciously but in these identity-obsessed times, no one can say, ‘Get off that, it’s not yours.’ I’ve got every right to do The Producers.”
Does Marber feel, then, that a non-Jewish director couldn’t direct it? “No, I think one of the reasons the rights were given to me was that I was from a Jewish comedy background. But anyone can direct The Producers. And Nathan Lane was immortal, but I think it does bring something slightly different to it that I’ve got Andy Nyman, a Jewish actor, playing Max — that’s the character. In Leopoldstadt I cast Jews as Jews and non-Jews as Jews. I’m not hung up on that kind of thing. I think there are non-Jews who can play Jews brilliantly.” He points to Helen Mirren playing Golda Meir in the 2023 film Golda. “It’s one of the greatest performances I’ve ever seen. She smokes magnificently, her accent is brilliant, she’s got full twinkle. She’s every inch a Jew.”
As for The Producers, Marber is presenting it as a “timeless fable”, dancing stormtroopers and all. “There are moments that are still quite shocking,” he says. “But I don’t think it’s offensive. It feels like we live in a society, an age, in which people are easily offended. But that hasn’t been my experience. We thought people were going to walk out of Nachtland — but no one did. So I think the culture is more liberal than we give it credit for.”
What We Talk About… might be a case in point. In Nathan Englander’s short story turned play, two Jewish-American couples — one secular and living in Florida, one orthodox and living in Israel — eat a bit, drink a lot and argue endlessly about the Holocaust, Hamas and where serves the best kosher food. It takes its title — and final scene — from a game Englander used to play with his sister whereby every new person they met was assessed through the prism of one question: “In the event of a second Holocaust, would they hide us?”
Marber and Englander were working on a draft last year when the October 7 attacks happened. They realized the play would have to change — and almost a year of rewrites later it opened in London. “We were very scared, we thought, oh my God, are there going to be protests?” Marber says. There weren’t, but one “major London theater” refused to stage it. “The artistic director was very keen to program it. The board liked the play too but vetoed a production due to ‘fear of potential optics’,” Marber says. He won’t say which theater. “I like the AD very much.”
“I think the culture is more liberal than we give it credit for.”
In the program for the play, Marber recounts how five or six years ago, he and the film director Jonathan Glazer met for breakfast. Glazer had just acquired the rights to Martin Amis’s The Zone of Interest — about the Auschwitz commandant and his family living next door to the concentration camp — and he wanted to talk to Marber about how their generation of artists might dare to tackle the Holocaust. The breakfasts became a regular fixture.
“They were great conversations. And very soon after that I was offered Leopoldstadt. So we both went off and did our Holocaust projects,” Marber tells me. “He’s sort of the only person with whom I can share the anxiety of even touching that material. I still have that anxiety. Should one? Can one? We both did it successfully. But… was it right to do it?”
Marber says he is not religious, “but I do have faith”. Growing up his family observed Friday nights and his father attended synagogue. After his father died in 2018, Marber found a family tree he had written out for his son with “murdered by the Nazis” written by several names.
“Sam Mendes told me of a phrase that Peter Hall used which haunts me. ‘Yes, well, he’s bumming a ride on the Holocaust.’ Agh! I don’t want to be bumming a ride, but anyone who writes about it is, to an extent. And yet … Glazer and I concluded informally that it’s our duty as Jews, of being another generation traumatized in their own way, to keep talking about it.”
Marber grew up in Wimbledon, the son of Brian, a TV writer turned stockbroker (“He got fired from the BBC, he had a bad temper …”) and Angela, a secretary to the playwrights Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall. Marber attended St Paul’s (he was expelled after a year) then Oxford and along the way became a stand-up. It was Armando Iannucci — who called him up on the strength of a couple of sketches he’d written for Radio 4 to join the On the Hour team alongside Steve Coogan and Chris Morris — who gave him his break.
“I’d do anything for him,” he says of Iannucci. “I really dread to think what I’d be had I not got the call from him.” Go on, what would he have been? He thinks, “at best” a football reporter, at worst a “degenerate gambler” — which he was for a time in his youth, a lifestyle that inspired his first play, Dealer’s Choice in 1995. His major hit, Closer, a bleak romantic drama about “sex, lies and the Internet” as a quote on the poster put it, opened two years later and became a film, starring Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Natalie Portman and Clive Owen.
He still describes directing as a side hustle from his main job of writing. “I couldn’t make a living as a playwright.” Is that a comment about the state of theater? “No,” he says, taking an enormous bite of a Tunnock’s chocolate teacake. “It’s about the state of my playwriting. I don’t write enough plays. I write one a decade so that’s not going to help.”
The last time I interviewed Marber was in 2015, and he had just written his first play in eight years, The Red Lion, inspired by his local team, Lewes FC (he remains one of its 2000 or so co-owners). Then, he told me that he’d had writer’s block since moving to the Sussex countryside with his wife, the actress Debra Gillett, and their three sons. “I called it writer’s block but … after many years of analysis I owned it as depression,” he says now. “I came out of analysis four years ago — wiser, sadder, but better for it. And I haven’t been blocked since. I’m slow, but I’m not blocked.”
“Sam Mendes told me of a phrase that Peter Hall used which haunts me. ‘Yes, well, he’s bumming a ride on the Holocaust.’”
Last year, both he and his son Albie were diagnosed with ADHD. They were reading up about a friend who had it and the checklist of symptoms seemed weirdly familiar. “So we saw a specialist and she said, ‘Oh yeah, off the scale, both of you.’” He now takes Ritalin when he needs to concentrate. Will he write more now? “Theoretically, yes. But it seems that however much speed I take, it doesn’t quite get me to the desk.”
He is writing a new play — and has been for 20 years, in fact. It’s set in the room of a tutor he used to visit in Kensington before he sat his A-levels. “But it’s not about me or a teacher. Really it’s about an old hooker, but that’s as much as I can reveal.” He’s also writing a sitcom with Tom Hollander “about disgrace” for Sky.
Next year he’ll mark 40 years in showbiz and is planning to throw a party, having largely ignored turning 60 this year. When he won his Tony Award last year he gave a wry little speech where he pointed out that he and his fellow director nominees didn’t get a moment on camera when their names were read out, unlike the actors. “No one wants to see our ugly faces, not even the director of this show…” he said. “We directors, we belong in the dark, we belong backstage, they made the right decision.”
He still has the ego of a performer, he says. “I haven’t had an audition in five years but I still live in hope.” Ideally, he’d become a character actor in his seventies, “one of those actors who pops up, says a couple of funny things and f***s off. I hope I won’t still have the desire to write and direct like I have now. It’s exhausting. But even in his eighties, Tom Stoppard wanted to write Leopoldstadt. That writing thing …” Another puff on his vape. “If it’s in you, you can’t escape it.”
Alice Jones is the deputy head of Culture & Books at The Times of London
