Patrick Marber says he feels a responsibility to his people

Patrick Marber’s career has had three distinct phases. He started off as a comedian and his work as a writer-performer in The Day Today and Knowing Me, Knowing You… with Alan Partridge were essential contributions to canonical British television of the 1990s. He shifted his focus to playwriting in the middle of that decade and penned Dealer’s Choice and Closer in quick succession, works that earned comparisons with Harold Pinter and ultimately led to screenwriting opportunities by the mid-2000s. In more recent times, he has become known for his theatre directing and has taken on plays by iconic Jewish figures like Pinter, Tom Stoppard, David Mamet and, most recently, Mel Brooks.

We are speaking in the immediate aftermath of the West End transfer of The Producers, the first major revival of the show in London since its original run. Marber did not see that production and, though a fan of Brooks, was “more drawn to Woody Allen as a comedian of the same generation”, saying he was “more of an influence as old Jewish comics go”. Still, he loves Brooks’ films and especially the “sheer joy and chutzpah” of the original movie so was delighted to be told by the son of the cinema legend that his father would be very happy with this version of his show. Brooks hasn’t been able to fly over since “the man is 99 and he’s probably got other things to think about”.

To the best of the director’s knowledge, The Producers was the first treatment of the Nazis in the aftermath of the full knowledge of the Holocaust that was not “solemn and serious”, released as it was in 1967, within spitting distance of the Second World War. He speaks with evident reverence about Brooks as “the first person to take it on and realise there was another way of looking at this”.

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Marber had a bar mitzvah and his family did the prayers for bread and wine on Friday nights but, when asked about how Jewish his upbringing was, the response is telling:

“I was very conscious of antisemitism and worried about it as a child. I experienced it at school. I remember learning about the Holocaust for the first time aged ten or eleven and being broken by the knowledge.”

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These days he considers himself “culturally but not religiously Jewish” a description he feels applies to many people in the creative arts. The last decade has seen him take on a plethora of plays addressing Judaism directly or penned by esteemed Jewish writers and it seems that the career move was both conscious and unconscious:

“You direct one, you get offered others… When I was doing Leopoldstadt, it was the first time I’d been in a rehearsal room with a lot of Jewish actors and I liked that feeling of community. I felt that this territory is allowed to be mine. In a culture war respect, nobody can say I don’t have the right to direct this play. It’s lived experience, I know the territory and I feel safe with it.”

Marber was approaching his 60s at that point and was keen to continue working. He recognised this was an area culturally he was “allowed to be” as well as the fact that there “aren’t that many Jewish directors around”. He felt interested in the subject as well as knowledgeable, mentioning that he has always been drawn to Jewish writers, praising above all Philip Roth, Arthur Miller, Neil Simon and his “current hero” Larry David.

Marber tends not to perform much these days although he would welcome the opportunity, feeling he is now of an age to become an “old character actor”. One notable aspect of his early work in front of the camera is the way in which his collaborations with Steve Coogan, Armando Iannucci and Chris Morris tended to deal in archetypes in much the same way The Producers does. He recognises that through line in his career: “The more I got into this play in rehearsals, the more I felt I’d been here before and stolen from this before without being fully conscious of it. Once you’ve seen The Producers as a young person, you can’t forget it… Big and real is what I say to the actors.”

Despite his status as a multihyphenate, Marber sees himself as a writer first and foremost: “I feel it’s what I’m meant to be doing and the thing I feel guilty about when I’m not doing it. It must be embedded in me more powerfully than acting or directing.” His definition of writing has an almost childlike sense of wonder, “plucking something out of the air that hasn’t been written before strikes me as the most magical thing, whether it’s a joke in a text or a sitcom.” He has, indeed, just written a situation comedy for Tom Hollander, his first pure comedy writing work in three decades.

The new production of The Producers identifies Bialystock and Bloom as Jews in a way that hasn’t been the case previously. This should come as no surprise given the director even found his Jewishness affecting his time as a director of Lewes Football Club, loathing leading board meetings and feeling that his “Jewish humour” means he prefers “sniping from the side”.

Marber’s work has undeniably become more overtly Jewish with the passing of time and he clearly feels a tremendous sense of responsibility, not just to Brooks but to his people at this particular historical juncture:

“As the Jewish director of what I think of as a Jewish musical, I’m conscious that we Jews are under siege at the moment. The rise of antisemitism is frightening for us and I feel it in my bones. We’ve been here before.”