NT : Go Backstage : Platform Papers : Patrick Marber
Patrick Marber
Patrick Marber in conversation with Nicholas Wright10 December 1994, Cottesloe Theatre NW I'm here to introduce Patrick Marber, whose play Dealer's Choice, which is also his production, had a thrilling opening here last night. About fifteen months ago you had a workshop showing of the first half of Dealer's Choice, How did that come about? PM I'd directed my friend Steve Coogan's show at the Edinburgh Festival in 1993 and that show appeared in the Purcell Room that summer. The people from the National's Studio saw it and liked it sufficiently to ask me if I had any ideas for a play, which I did. I'd always wanted to write a play and I had an idea for something that I probably wouldn't have got round to writing if they hadn't asked me. They invited me to do two weeks at the Studio with a cast and the play gradually emerged from those improvisations. NW How much did you know about it when you started? PM I knew the play was about poker, that I would dramatise a poker game, I knew I had a father and son relationship in it, and I knew I had a central comic character who would be an idiot. That became the character called Mugsy. NW Did you know who the other characters would be? PM No, I had no idea, and I didn't know it would be set in a restaurant at that point. NW So how did you cast the people who weren't the father, the son, or Mugsy? How did you know who else you wanted in it? PM I didn't cast anyone in fact. I was given a list of names of actors who said they might be vaguely interested in doing some improvisations about a possible play, possibly about gambling. I ended up with seven people and they were the ones I chose to be in it, because they were the only ones who wanted to be. Fortunately, three of them [David Bark-Jones, Nicholas Day, Nigel Lindsay] have survived all the way through into the final production. NW How did the restaurant emerge? PM I can't remember. If I'm being pretentious about it, I'd say a restaurant has an inherent power structure and the play explores male power relationships. But I think the honest answer is because one of the actors knew a bit about cooking. NW The owner of the restaurant is a very complex character with a curious, rather lethal, blend of chilly control and whimsicality a very changing, fascinating character. How did that come about? From you, from the actor? PM From both. I asked Nicholas Day to think of a character he'd like to be, a man who might be the boss of a restaurant (once we'd established it was a restaurant), and he came up with this guy who was not so dissimilar from, and not so similar to himself. We worked on it and asked a lot of questions about his background and invented a whole life for him. It was a collaboration I didn't create this character, we created it together. NW Were the cast all poker players? PM They all said they were at first. In fact it emerged that only one of them was a competent poker player; ironically it was the actor playing Mugsy. NW So did you write during this workshop? PM No, I recorded improvisations on a tape machine and then when I came to write the play I listened to the tapes, but I'd failed to record them. So I listened to absolutely nothing and tried to remember the best bits. NW Then, about February last year, there was another workshop when you showed both acts. PM What happened was that after showing Act One, the Studio liked it sufficiently to invite me back to do what is called a Studio production. This time you get a choice over who you have in the production, so I was able to cast it, and my cast was all the people who'd done it originally. I just asked them all back. It seemed a lot simpler, and they were all very good as well. So over Christmas I actually wrote the play and that became the first draft. We had a four week rehearsal period at the Studio and then we put it on for an invited audience: friends, and people from this building who make decisions. It was done with very rudimentary props and set. It was more than a rehearsed reading, it was an acted reading. On that basis, someone made the decision and said would you like to put it on at the Cottesloe. And I said yes. NW When the play was shown at that stage, there was, I remember, an upper middle class couple who arrived at the restaurant, more or less at the point where the character Ash does now. What happened to them? PM They got killed off in the next draft. They were a yuppie couple who ate in the restaurant on the night of this play a brother and sister in fact. Through no fault of the actors playing those parts, I realised that the characters were superfluous to the story I was trying to tell, so I invented a new character Ash, a professional poker player. He came in in the next draft, in September of 1994. NW I remember in that draft the play ended with quite a long sustained scene of challenge and recrimination between the father and son. Was that important to you? PM The last scene had always been a problem. I like it now because very little happens in the last scene and the play is kind of open-ended and fizzles out into nothing. This is what I should always have done, but in earlier drafts I thought it's the last scene of the play, something important must happen. At one point there was a fight in it. Finally, with the help of the actors, I realised it wasn't working, and I turned it into a very basic coda. NW You've said quite often, referring to a change you've made, that it was with the help of the actors. Is this a way you'd work in television? How does the whole process of writing the play compare with writing for television, for you? PM It's fairly similar. In television I've always worked collaboratively, with a group of people, specifically with Steve Coogan and our producer, Armando Iannucci, and various others. With Dealer's Choice I've worked collaboratively in rehearsal, and then gone away all on my own and written it. Then I've shown them my work and they've said "Ooh, that's good", or "I don't like that", or "Can I have another joke there". It's totally collaborative but ultimately I'm the only one sitting at the word processor, whereas with the things I've done on TV, three of us sit at the word processor and fight over each line, which takes a lot longer and causes more arguments. NW When you've made little cuts in the play, as you have in the last few weeks, it's often been a joke that's cut, and I thought seeing the play last night that it was even bleaker and darker than I'd thought, though I think it could still be described as a comedy. There's something very upsetting in it which is that everyone in the play has moments when they seem to be completely in control of their own world, and then there's a point when they turn out to be second or third best to somebody else. Even Ash who's a figure of great authority when he first arrives, and who everybody's a bit alarmed by, in the end emerges as rather a pathetic character who's even possibly the mug for a whole bunch of other poker players that we never see. PM Yes, it's a fairly grim night out, ultimately. I find writing comic lines much easier than constructing dramatic situations, so I've had to be quite disciplined with myself and not allow there to be jokes at the expense of plot. The task for me has been to create a real situation with real characters and tell a story, and try not to put in gags because I can't resist it. So I have pared it down a bit, but then again I've re-written speeches over the last week, during previews, and I've added one or two new little gags, and the actors of course have improvised the odd line here and there which stays in. NW So then there was a third workshop, just before rehearsals started for the Cottesloe, but quite separate from rehearsals. And this was the point at which the character of Ash appeared. What was the purpose of this final workshop? PM It was purely to integrate this new character into the play, and to show the existing actors the new draft. I'd offered the part to Tom Georgeson before the part had been written, so I was in quite a difficult situation. He'd come to meet me, I'd said this is the play, your character's not in it yet but I promise it'll be good. He said, "All right, I'll take a risk" which was very nice. I knew I had that three week space to make sure that the part was going to work and that he'd be good in it, which he is. NW The character comes from Liverpool. Why was that? PM Everyone else in the play is either North-London-Cockney-ish or posh-North-London, and he is the outsider in the group. It's the classic story of an enclosed group of people who all know each other very well and an outsider comes in and mucks things up for them. I thought I'd make him geographically an outsider as well. NW There's something very unusual about the play, which is that there's no long, sustained speech in it. Very often, even in a play which is full of life and to-and-fro, the author can't resist the temptation to stop everything while one character talks for a page or two, reminiscing or perhaps telling you about some traumatic event which happened to them many years ago. Were you ever tempted to do anything like that? PM I wrote the sort of play that I enjoy seeing. I don't like long speeches, and that's why there aren't any. It's as simple as that. It's why the play isn't that long, too, I think. I think an hour and ten minutes is about how long an act should be, tops. I twitch about if someone starts speaking for too long. In earlier drafts, as a first time playwright, there were a lot of scenes where someone would say "Come and sit down. Let's talk." And I suddenly realised that whenever I go to a play and someone says "Let's talk", you know you're going to have a long boring scene where they talk. So I cut all of that out and just didn't put any long speeches in. There didn't seem the need, really. Maybe none of the characters is articulate enough to sustain one. NW Is there an autobiographical element in it, apart from the fact that you play poker? The characters in the play all turn out to be compulsive gamblers.
Are you a compulsive gambler?
PM Certainly not! I have gambled, I would say, compulsively for a while maybe for a couple of years, but I'm not any more. Although that's the most dangerous thing an ex-compulsive can ever say. Yes, there's a biographical element in the play. NW Was your compulsive gambling period when you were the age of Carl, the son in the play? PM Roughly speaking, but I'm not Carl. I wasn't particularly like Carl. It's too easy to say, "Yeah, I'm Carl and my dad's Stephen". It's probably true, but what do I know? I mean, yes and no, of course. As in any fiction you use bits of yourself. There's bits of me in Mugsy and in Sweeney and Frankie. You dot yourself throughout the text, and that's the best way of hiding. NW What's the most you ever lost in one night? PM More than I get paid for directing this show. NW Seriously? PM No, not seriously. But a lot. Obviously more than I'm prepared to say. An embarrassing amount of money. But equally I've won more than I'm prepared to say. NW It's a bit of a clichι to ask this, but it's the thing about poker being a metaphor. Is that right? It's true in the play that the characters often keep poker faces, and mask their feelings behind jokes, and macho display, or malice or whatever. Were you looking at a parallel to the poker game in the way that people behave outside the game? PM Yes. Very obviously so. But I suppose I thought that poker is so obviously a metaphor for life that I didn't want to write a play that makes that point. It's so obviously true that most male relationships are structured upon a fundamental bluff, which is that we are men and must not show our true feelings, and all those boring observations one can make about the male sex. So really, yes, poker is the metaphor that runs through the play but it's not a controlling metaphor. I was never going to have a character say "Hey, it's a bit like life, this crazy business..." (That could have been the long speech, in fact.) It just seemed so obvious, that it wasn't a point worth making. Really I thought poker would give me an opportunity to be funny. I thought, "This is a good situation, six blokes sitting round a table shooting the breeze". My original intention had been to write a pure comedy, then as I got more interested in the characters, I also got more interested in the darker aspects of it. I was never trying to write a play that demonstrated something about poker, particularly. But that said, poker is about power, and the play is about power in many respects. NW One character says to another in the play "It's no fun for you unless you lose", referring to the attraction of losing. Is that true of poker? PM I've never found losing pleasurable myself, but I know what he means. I think what I was trying to get at was that if you indulge any of your vices it has an attractiveness, you get a shot of adrenalin, so whether you win or lose as a gambler, you're psychologically involved, you're excited, you're fuelling an addiction. I assume it's the same with alcohol or drugs. So in a way, being a compulsive gambler is a no-lose situation. Whether you win or lose you still get the high, still get the kick. Audience questionWhen you write a play, how do you try to grab the audience's attention at the outset?
PM I try to make them laugh, ideally. This is my first play, and that's what I tried to do in this play, I tried to be funny from the word go, because I feel if an audience are laughing then they're engaged immediately with what's going on on stage. It sounds like a very crass answer but it's the truth. Audience questionWhy does it have to be funny? Wouldn't it be just as attention-grabbing to have a suicide to start with?
PM I've only written one play. Maybe in the next play I'll have someone come on and kill themselves at the beginning. It sounds like a funny beginning already. Very simply, I would always start with a laugh if I could. NW Was the first scene as it is now played always your first scene? PM Yes. NW I think you've cut a line. I remember Mugsy said "I nearly won the lottery" and Sweeney said "How can you nearly win the lottery?" Was that a line that didn't get a response? PM No, that was because the particular actor who plays Sweeney objected to saying "How can you nearly win the lottery?" I said, you've got to say that because it will be funny, but he said "Naah, won't work mate". So we did a trade-off. There's another line later in the play that he says he doesn't like but I make him say it. I don't know what result I got because he still doesn't say the lottery line, but when I write up the final draft for publication, I'll stick the line back in and that will be my revenge. Audience questionDo you have a second play planned? PM I have a second play in my head. If it gets beyond my head I'll be very pleased. There is a plan for me to write a second play and for it to be produced at the National Studio, as Dealer's Choice was. What will happen to it beyond that, I don't know. Audience question
You said the play didn't originally have the character of Ash in it, but it seems hard to imagine how it would have worked dramatically without him. What was the dramatic structure previously? PM Ah, well that's the problem you see, there wasn't any. Yes, that's exactly right. It now seems incredible to me. How could I possibly have written this play without that character? He seems so central, so important to it, which of course he is. In the original drafts, Mugsy was really the central character in terms of the plot. It was much more to do with his scheme and his ambition. The story of the father and son was less significant and I wanted to beef that up a bit. I did that by bringing in this outside force. It had a snowball effect and the play became much more about surrogate fathers and sons and the way that Stephen, the boss, is Mugsy's surrogate father and Ash is Carl's. It seems extraordinary to me now that I could have missed such an obvious thing as bringing this character in. Audience question
Could you tell us a bit about Mugsy the character is extremely funny and almost loveable, but ultimately fairly horrible. How did you decide what his end should be? PM He's a loser who thinks he's a winner, which is a fairly grim diagnosis. A deluded loser. I wanted to dispose of him unsentimentally, that was always crucial to it. I had this great buffoon clodding around the stage, and I wanted to make sure that he was disposed of in quite a cruel way. I didn't want some sort of sentimental ending for the character. I like him very much but he certainly wasn't going to win, his dream wasn't going to come true. NW You've always been very hot on giving him remarks to make which are slightly offensive like when he thinks he's actually beaten Stephen, he gloats about it in a very unsympathetic way so he doesn't get too cuddly. PM Yes, because he's the ostensibly funny character in the play, I wanted to make sure he was never totally lovable. It would be too easy if the funny character were the most lovable one. So he's homophobic, he's sexist and he's a very poor winner. He's unpleasant in many ways. Audience question
There are no women in Dealer's Choice. Is this because you don't feel happy writing about women? PM The next play does have women in it. Not because I feel some pressure to put women in it but because I've written about men, now I'd like to write about women. I didn't censor myself in any way with this play. I suppose I did originally by sticking a woman in there just for the sake of it, but I took her straight out again when I realised it was a token woman character. There didn't seem to be any point, it was just an insult to the actress who would end up playing this part that was shoddily written and unnecessary to the story. I'd much prefer to write a play with two or three good parts for women. Audience question
What makes you laugh, on stage or screen? PM Vic and Bob I like very much. King of Comedy. Spinal Tap I think is very funny. I like Quentin Tarantino's stuff very much. That makes me laugh. NW You laughed in Pulp Fiction then? Did you laugh when Uma Thurman had the needle stuck in her chest. PM I was in uproar. But hysterical laughter. Yes. I love that. I love to be shocked. I like my senses abused. I walk around thinking "Hey, I'm an unshockable person. Nothing shocks me." So when something does, I find it very funny. Audience question
Your TV series both started life as radio programmes. In which medium do you think they work best? PM I have no idea. Sorry. I'm not being glib. I'm involved in the writing of the TV programmes and the radio programmes. I think that The Day Today is funnier than On the Hour, and I think Knowing Me Knowing You on the radio is more consistently funny than on TV, but I think stuff in the TV show is funnier than some of the stuff in the radio show. So I'm quite happy with all of it. Audience question
What was it that made you want to write for the stage? PM I'd always wanted to write for the stage from when I was first taken to the theatre as a boy, and the stage had always been my first love as a form. I'd always hoped I would be a playwright. Then when I first started trying to write plays, I found it impossibly difficult. I took a very long way round to end up writing for the stage but it didn't surprise me when I started writing a play because I knew it was always something I wanted to do and it had just taken me a long time to get round to it. NW Did you always think you'd direct? PM No. I didn't assume that I would be directing this play, but no-one ever told me I wasn't, so it just kind of happened really. NW You obviously had directed it in the Studio and that was very good and the actors all liked working with you, so there was no reason why you should think you wouldn't, was there? PM I suppose because I hadn't directed before and it's the National Theatre so you assume they'll bring in some grisly guy with a beard to ruin my play for me. Yes, I was surprised and obviously dead chuffed that it was thought I would be worthy of it. It was a great thrill but it had never been my assumption that I would direct this play. NW Still, as you very prudently kept that thought to yourself, it just happened. PM Yes, by day one of rehearsals, there didn't seem to be a grisly guy with a beard, so I realised it had to be me. NW Was there a moment then, let's say the technical rehearsal, when you thought "I've never done this before " not that there were any problems with it at all, I have to say PM No there weren't any problems, but apparently I did revolutionise the technical process because I cut from cue to cue which is apparently blasphemy in the theatre, but that's what we always do in TV. It's a boring thing, but rather than running through the whole play and then stopping each time you get to a technical cue, I just went from cue to cue. Very dull show-biz anecdote. NW The thing I wanted to ask you was why you decided to stage it in the Cottesloe in the traverse, with the seating on either side. It's a beautiful and unusual use of the theatre, but what made you decide on that? PM I and my designer [Bunny Christie] had to find a way of dramatising a poker game, and I didn't want to cheat that. A poker game is played with people sitting round a table, all facing each other. Had I done it end-on or proscenium, I would have had to have a Last Supper type effect, and I didn't want to do that. So that was the primary reason for this staging. On a deeper thematic level, the play is about confrontation, about these guys taking each other on verbally and metaphorically, and to have the audience facing each other would be interesting. The Cottesloe hadn't been used in traverse for a while, and I thought it would be fun. Audience question
How did you and Steve Coogan start working together? PM We first met years ago. Steve was an impressionist on the cabaret circuit and I did stand-up comedy in those days. (I sound like an old man it was only about five years ago.) So we knew each other from around, as you do, you get to know the other comics on the circuit. Then we were both cast in the same radio show On the Hour we enjoyed working together and used to do improvisations together and shared a similar sense of humour and became friends. He asked me to direct his show in Edinburgh, which was the one I mentioned at the start. Audience question
How do you go about making people laugh in your writing? PM I don't know. I can't tell you all my secrets. Surprise is always good. I like to trust an audience. I like to believe an audience is as clever as me if not cleverer, and I believe that's a very good place to start. If you begin with that premise you don't patronise an audience. Audiences like to feel intelligent, and so I always assume the audience is me and what makes me laugh I assume will make other people laugh. Audience question
Was it difficult to gauge how an audience would react to your work, as a first time playwright working at the Studio? PM At all stages of the writing of the play I did have audiences, however small, sometimes only five people. At every point we did rehearsed readings, and Nick went to all of them so he knows better than most that it went through various drafts. At every stage there were always people coming to look at it, not because they were snooping but because I wanted them to see it. So I was very well supported by the people at the Studio, by the company of actors I had, by the literary department here, and so on. There were always people I could go to and ask Is this working? What do you think of this? But ultimately I had to trust my own judgement. To this day, the play is not perfect. I have to live with it now because this is the play, the actors know their lines, I can't piss them about any more. If I had my way I'd come in every day with re-writes, but I can't, I have to let it be what it is.