He’s in the Chips

With only two plays to his name, being staged in the West End still feels like a novelty to Patrick Marber. But it doesn’t mean the territory is unfamiliar to him.

A few days before the opening of his second play, “Closer,” at the Lyric Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue, in the heart of London’s commercial theater district, Marber sat in an empty dressing room and reflected on the ironies of geography.

“It’s strange being at this particular theater,” he mused. “Because on either side of the street are casinos I frequented in my youth--the Golden Nugget on Shaftesbury Avenue, where I’ve lost more money than I care to think about, and the Charlie Chester Casino on Archer Street, directly behind the stage door.

“I can remember 10 years ago walking past the Lyric stage door, and the notion of a stage door was not in any way part of my life.” Instead, he added with a bleak quip, the theater was part of a “golden triangle,” bounded by the casinos and an automatic teller machine from which he would draw cash, then trudge back to the casinos and gamble that away too.

Back then, Marber was still a student at Oxford but an inveterate gambler. The habit, along with a weakness for alcohol, clung to him after university, when he embarked on a career as a stand-up comic.

“In those days I used to gamble with everything I had,” he said with a sigh. “In my post-student days, I’d do comedy gigs, then go to a casino. I’ve done a bit of growing up. I’m a much happier person than I was then.”

He has every reason to be. Marber, 34, is unquestionably Britain’s hottest young playwright. His first two plays--”Dealer’s Choice” and “Closer”--were staged at the National Theatre under his direction. They received rave reviews and were deemed responsible for attracting audiences who rarely attend the theater, many of them young metropolitan professionals.

The subject of Marber’s former addiction has a resonance that is more than geographical. His first play, “Dealer’s Choice,” which has its West Coast premiere at the Mark Taper Forum on Thursday, is specifically about gambling. Its third act consists of a poker game among all its characters--a middle-aged restaurateur, his son, two waiters, a cook and an enigmatic figure to whom the son owes money.

After being produced at the subsidized National Theatre, “Dealer’s Choice” won the 1995 Evening Standard Award for best comedy, and when it later transferred to a commercial theater, it won the Writers’ Guild Award for best West End play.

Critics virtually swooned, comparing the play favorably to the gambling-themed film “The Cincinnati Kid” and hailing an extraordinary debut. “Marber throughout plays his own hand with consummate dramatic skill,” enthused the Guardian’s Michael Billington. The success of “Dealer’s Choice” was astonishing for two more reasons, the first being the fact that Marber also directed the play, something he had never done before. Then there was his unlikely background for a stunning new theatrical talent--after four years of limited success as a stand-up comic, Marber joined an ensemble including fellow comedians Armando Ianucci and Steve Coogan, appearing on British TV and radio in the shows “On the Hour,” “The Day Today” and “Knowing Me, Knowing You.” He stayed with the team for another four years, but nothing about his background suggested he would make such a splash in the theater.

Marber, a heavyset man with a calm, almost shy manner and mournful, strikingly blue eyes, which he keeps mostly downcast in conversation, insists he did not hold out to direct his own work.

“My directing career has really happened by chance,” he said. “I wrote the first draft of ‘Dealer’s Choice’ by putting a group of actors together and getting them to improvise stuff. Maybe the first half-hour of the play came from improvisations which I’d directed. I’d never directed before, but in my comedy background I’d been quite heavily involved in improvisation. That’s how we generated a lot of material for the comedy work on TV.

“So when the National Theatre decided they wanted to put on ‘Dealer’s Choice,’ Richard Eyre [then artistic director] asked me to direct. My instinct was to say no, but his argument was because of the particular way the play had evolved, I should take the risk.

“I hadn’t thought of myself as a potential theater director till I found myself directing my first play at the National.”

Quite a debut.

“I know,” Marber said sheepishly. “I was much more nervous about my directorial debut than my writing debut. I’d written before, but I felt I was learning on the job as a director. I had experienced actors and a stage management team who were kind to me, if slightly wearied by my errors. I didn’t know the language. I literally didn’t know which way downstage was. But you pick it up.”

Since then Marber has learned that he works best as a writer in the rehearsal room. He works up a draft of a play sufficiently developed to interest actors but warns them he will rewrite extensively in rehearsal.

“Being the director gives me the freedom to do that,” he said wryly. “There are few directors who would tolerate the amount of reworking I do in rehearsal. It’s easier being the director. I can see if something isn’t working and change it.”

After its initial staging, however, Marber does not always direct. In fact, “Dealer’s Choice” has been staged four times in the United States by other directors: at the Olympic Arts Festival in Atlanta, in Chicago, in Connecticut and off-Broadway. As in London, the response to the play was very strong.

“It was well-received,” Marber said. “American audiences are alert to the ebb and flow of a poker game. They almost applauded the hands.” In Los Angeles, “Dealer’s Choice,” it will be directed by Taper Producing Director Robert Egan.

If “Dealer’s Choice” was a notable debut, “Closer” has taken London by storm. It has been called a modern-day version of Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and like that play, it features a cast of two men and two women. Marber’s quartet meet, have sex with and betray one another in various groupings; it is a candid treatise about the emotional traumas selfish people choose to inflict on one another. The language of “Closer” is often foulmouthed, but it has no nudity or sexual activity.

Again, critics salivated. The Daily Telegraph’s Charles Spencer said that though Marber’s writing “seems to have been ripped straight from the gut,” his sense of artistic control was “formidable.” London’s Sunday Times called it “one of the best plays of sexual politics in the language.” The National Theatre’s Eyre calls his work “preternaturally mature.”

Predictably, in looking for superlatives, reviewers have compared Marber’s use of language and emphasis on structure to writers such as David Mamet and Harold Pinter. Marber has ambivalent feelings about that but insists his writing methods make direct comparisons misleading.

“With both plays I started with characters before I had a theme,” he noted. “Shape and theme emerge simultaneously. I start with a voice in my head or an image. With ‘Dealer’s Choice’ I knew I wanted to write about a poker game. I wanted a father and son central to it. I wanted to explore domestic power through the obvious metaphor of poker playing.

“I knew that at the heart of ‘Closer’ was a girl whose identity was questionable. My notion was of a [Milan] Kundera, [Krzysztof] Kieslowski type of play, a European art film onstage,” he said, referring to the Czech writer and the late Polish film director, respectively. “Then as I wrote, it became a London love story. I didn’t know it would be about jealousy, betrayal, deception, sex, love and violent emotions until I was heavily into it. Then I got interested in the sexual psychology, which took me in a different direction.”

As for direct influences, Marber will soon be directing Mamet’s “The Old Neighborhood” at London’s Royal Court theater.

“Strangely enough, Mamet’s never written a play about poker,” Marber pointed out. “He wrote lots of prose about it and one scene in his film ‘House of Games.’ But, yes, of course, ‘Dealer’s Choice’ is a Mametian idea. The father and son, maybe that’s more Arthur Miller--the fractured relationship where they love each other but can’t speak to each other.

“If not for Mamet’s ‘Glengarry Glen Ross,’ I wouldn’t have written ‘Dealer’s Choice.’ I couldn’t have written ‘Closer’ without Pinter’s ‘Betrayal.’ They’re primary source texts. I hope I’m beginning to develop my own voice, but for now I’m a playwright whose influences are visible.

“I’m not ashamed of that. One frightening thing about success with your first two plays is you aren’t given time to find your voice. You arrive fully formed, but I don’t feel fully formed as a writer. Nor should I be.”

He smiled ruefully.

“It’s possible I’ll be a classic victim of my own success. I’ve gotten past ‘second album syndrome,’ though I’m aware when the third play comes in there’s a level of expectation. But that’s OK.”

Marber mused on all this with calm self-assurance, nurtured by growing up in an affluent Jewish family in Wimbledon, near the tennis club. His father was a successful financial analyst. As a boy, Marber was more interested in sports than academic matters but became bookish in his teens. Before his plays were produced, he wrote “After Miss Julie,” an adaptation of Strindberg’s play transposing the setting to an English country house in 1945.

He never made it as a stand-up comic: “I was not that good. I was adequate, I could survive onstage. But I was nowhere near to doing a one-man show. And I had no particular desire to expand my half-hour set into an hour. I never had visions of people paying to come and see me.”

He quit stand-up in November 1992, “and I never once wished I could go back.” Yet he believes that his stand-up years shaped him as a playwright: “My dialogue probably reveals the paranoia of the stand-up. If you’re not quick and interesting, the audience will be gone. There’s no point setting up a joke for five minutes before you deliver the punch line.”

Marber also likens writing plays to developing a stand-up act: “You write a joke, add to it, and it becomes a routine. From one line it becomes 20 minutes of material. Work it up, and you have a scene.”

Yet he felt more at home in the collaborative world of TV comedy writing and performing with Coogan and Ianucci. “On the Hour” on radio and “The Day Today” on TV were both savagely funny parodies of broadcast news with its self-important presenters, its trivial agenda and its reliance on computer graphics, complex to the point of meaninglessness. “Knowing Me, Knowing You” was a fictional talk show from hell, with Coogan as the host Alan Partridge, supposedly an inept former sports presenter. Guests were fictional too; in one memorable episode, Marber played one who collapsed and died on camera while being interviewed by Partridge.

“Great comedy,” as Marber likes to say, “is always sadistic.”

Hollywood studios track his career attentively. He has had offers for “Closer” but will not sell film rights before it opens on Broadway this fall: “If it’s a success I’ll get more money. And directing the play on Broadway will be the last time I direct it. I want to get it out of my system as a director before I decide whether I want to make a film of it myself.”

He also has a decidedly skeptical view of Hollywood: “People in ‘the business’ [he enunciates the phrase sarcastically] say, ‘Oh, you wrote a play. Will it be a movie?’ As if the play is just a steppingstone to what you actually want, which is making a movie.

“I’m more interested in writing an original screenplay than regurgitating old work. I’ve got vague ideas, but I’m not in a rush. In the theater you get to say what you want to say in a form you want to say it in. No one yet has said to me, ‘You can’t say that; you can’t do that.’ I can’t imagine that freedom in movies.”

All this is heady stuff, far removed from his days as an impoverished, unsuccessful gambler.

“Indeed,” agreed Marber, looking temporarily sour. Does he still gamble? “Yeah, a little poker now and then.

“There’s a big difference, though. Now it would take me at least a week to gamble away everything I had.” And he looked up at last, to check whether this deadpan line was taken seriously or as a dark joke.

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* “Dealer’s Choice,” Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave. Opens Thursday. Regular schedule: Tuesdays to Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Ends May 31. $29-$37. (213) 628-2772.