Patrick Marber: 'I didn't have a hip new play in me'

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Patrick Marber: “I didn’t have a hip new play in me”

As his acclaimed debut, 'Dealer's Choice', is revived, Patrick Marber discusses his anxieties about writing with Dominic Cavendish

"Do you know the poker scene?" Patrick Marber has such a direct way of putting things and such a searching intensity of gaze that after only a split second of hesitation I confess that no actually, I don't.

Or rather, all I really know about poker – in terms of what it feels like to take part, watch one's stake evaporate before one's eyes or clean up – owes everything to Marber's play Dealer's Choice. Why bluff when faced with a pro?

Only someone thoroughly steeped in the game could have caught the tense, edgy, excitable mood of a poker table as expertly as Marber did with his debut back in 1995.

At the time, it arrived on the National's Cottesloe stage, to be greeted with ecstatic reviews, it emerged that the author – then best-known as a member of the hyper-talented gang that produced On the Hour, The Day Today and Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge – had been a compulsive poker player as an English student at Oxford. For some time afterwards, it was his livelihood, entailing night after night at a game in Archway, north London.

Loose biographical connections between him and the young man at the centre of the play, the drifting, indebted Carl, whose restaurateur father Stephen runs a weekly game, were there for the spotting. And today Marber confirms that yes, "he was a notional me, plus a few friends of mine who were in deep and a bit out of control".

This month's revival at the Menier Chocolate Factory – the first major one in London since the première – represents a brief encounter for Marber with his younger self. The older Marber, 43, hasn't given up on the game altogether ("I play live a bit and online a bit"), but now "it's a hobby, whereas it used to be what I did day in day out". Marriage, kids and a move to the country have inevitably made him more prudent. "My racy gambling days are over," he says.

Opening tonight, Sam West's staging also represents a confrontation with the huge hopes pinned on Marber as a consequence of his first play's dazzling display of wit, harsh truth and dramatic concision. Those early, giddy days, when he finally arrived at his vocation, were "amazing", he recalls.

Two years on, Closer – his smart, sexy, bleak drama about two sets of unfaithful, cross-tangled lovers – proved he was no one-hit wonder and even saw him hailed as "the leading playwright of his generation".

More than the other young turks who arrived in the mid-'90s, it was this comedy renegade, whose plays appeared equally at home at the National and in the West End, who looked best able to combine intellectual integrity with commercial clout.

Marber is astute enough and honest enough to hear the question at the back of our minds: 10 years after Closer's triumph, and six years after decidedly mixed reviews for the follow-up, Howard Katz – about a Jewish showbiz agent in mid-life meltdown – where's the big new play?

It's not as if he hasn't been busy or successful these past years. There have been sassy, anglicised updates of European classics at the Donmar - After Miss Julie from Strindberg and Don Juan in Soho after Molière.

He has glided without a hitch into premier-league screenwriting: his stylish adaptations of Closer and Notes on a Scandal earned him a Golden Globe nomination and Academy Award nomination respectively. He's currently working on Ian McEwan's Saturday, and there's a film script for Don Juan to be cracking on with, too. The circles he moves in, when not writing in his garden shack in Sussex, or being a dad, sound glamorous.

Having his moment in the spotlight in LA is all very well, all good fun, he says, "but the real business of my life is getting another play out. That's what concerns me and that's what I mustn't concern myself with. I can't put it another way. Another couple of years and I'm officially blocked."

Is it that bad? "Every play is back to square one. It's a waiting game. They come slowly or not at all. I have to be patient. You're either a conscious or an unconscious writer, and I'm an unconscious writer. I'm a loafer. I dawdle and go for long walks, then I write with feverish intensity, late at night, in sustained four- or five-hour bursts. Once they appear, they appear very quickly."

If he was bruised by the dismissal of Howard Katz, the hurt doesn't show. "They didn't like it in London, they didn't like it in New York, so it's my runt. I thought it was a surprising play for me to write. After Closer, I was supposed to write another hip, young play, but I didn't have one in me.

"It did what I intended it to do. I was proud of it, but it was 2001 – my wife was pregnant, we were moving, September 11 happened. I had bigger things on my mind than the success or failure of my play. Still, it's good to learn that not everything you write is going to be a success."

Thoughtful and exact in speech, as he is on the page, Marber is, as one might gather from Dealer's Choice, guarded about what he reveals – but he's genial, not glacial, in conversation. There's a moment, though, when I glimpse a quiet rage. Inferring that I want him to show his hand – divulge what's agitating him enough to write – he frowns.

"To me everything that has gone wrong in our culture is about how if we can just unlock the writer, the artist, the poet, the musician enough, we'll find the little thing that produced the work and then we can crush it. And we can move on to someone else and crush that. Art is infinitely more mysterious and infinitely more practical than the world thinks it is. There's a core mystery and no one gets at that and then there's the practical thing of the work in the shack."

He pauses. "It's a very, very black ink and you might only have a tiny bit of it to dip your nib into. You can't go splattering it about."

No simple answers, then, about what's on the cards. One thing is plain – whatever does emerge will share much with the work that has gone before. "All my plays are about the same thing: they're all about longing and lostness and loneliness and desperation. I don't think I'll ever write about anything else. It's my subject, it's my territory."