Patrick Marber | |
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Born | Patrick Albert Crispin Marber 19 September 1964 |
Education | Wadham College, Oxford (BA) |
Occupation(s) | Comedian, playwright, director, actor, screenwriter |
Spouse | |
Children | 3 |
Patrick Albert Crispin Marber (born 19 September 1964) [1] is an English comedian, playwright, [2] director, actor, and screenwriter.
Marber was born and raised in a middle-class Jewish family in Wimbledon, London, [3] [4] the son of Angela (Benjamin), a theatre secretary, and Brian Marber, a technical analyst. [5] [6] [7] He was educated at Rokeby School, St Paul's School, Cranleigh School, and Wadham College, Oxford where he studied English. [8]
After working for a few years as a stand-up comedian, primarily as part of a comedy double act with author Guy Browning, Marber became a writer and cast member on the radio shows On the Hour and Knowing Me, Knowing You , and their television spinoffs The Day Today and Knowing Me, Knowing You... with Alan Partridge . Amongst other roles, Marber portrayed hapless reporter Peter O'Hanraha-hanrahan in both On the Hour and The Day Today , and was involved in a dispute with the comedians Stewart Lee and Richard Herring, who had written for On the Hour , about who had invented the character. Lee and Herring's TV show Fist of Fun would later make several references to their feud with Marber, calling him a "Cornish curmudgeon". In Stewart Lee's 2010 book, How I Escaped My Certain Fate, Marber is referred to as a "new Shakespeare". [9] Marber reunited with the Knowing Me, Knowing You team in 2003 to record commentaries for the DVD release of the show. He also contributed some new in-character audio material to the DVD release of The Day Today in 2004.
He co-writes Bunk Bed for BBC Radio 4, which he created with Peter Curran. [10] [11] It was first broadcast during April 2014, [12] with the fifth series broadcast in 2018, with special guest Jane Horrocks.
Marber's first play was Dealer's Choice , which he also directed. Set in a restaurant and based around a game of poker (and partly inspired by his own experiences with gambling addiction), it opened at the National Theatre in February 1995, and won the 1995 Evening Standard Award for Best Comedy.
After Miss Julie , a version of the Strindberg play Miss Julie , was broadcast on BBC television in the same year. In this, Marber moves the action to Britain in 1945, at the time of the Labour Party's victory in the general election, with Miss Julie as the daughter of a Labour peer. A stage version, directed by Michael Grandage, was first performed 2003 at the Donmar Warehouse, London by Kelly Reilly, Richard Coyle and Helen Baxendale. It later had a production at the American Airlines Theatre on Broadway in 2009.
His play Closer , a comedy of sex, dishonesty, and betrayal, opened at the National Theatre in 1997, again directed by Marber. This too won the Evening Standard award for Best Comedy, as well as the Critics' Circle Theatre Awards and Laurence Olivier awards for Best New Play. It has proved to be an international success, having been translated into thirty languages. A film adaptation, written by Marber, was released in 2004, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Natalie Portman, and Clive Owen.
In Howard Katz, his next play, Marber presented very different subject matter: a middle-aged man struggling with life, death and religion. This was first performed in 2001, again at the National Theatre, but was less favourably received by the critics and has been less of a commercial success than some of his other work. A new production by the Roundabout Theatre Company opened Off-Broadway in March 2007, with Alfred Molina in the title role. A play for young people, The Musicians, about a school orchestra's visit to Russia, was performed for the National Theatre's Shell Connections programme in 2004, its first production being at the Sydney Opera House.
Don Juan in Soho , his contemporary rendering of Molière's comedy Dom Juan , opened at the Donmar Warehouse in 2006, directed by Michael Grandage and with Rhys Ifans in the lead role. [13]
He also co-wrote the screenplay for Asylum (2005), directed by David Mackenzie, and was sole screenwriter for the film Notes on a Scandal (2006), for which he was nominated for an Oscar at the 79th Academy Awards. [14]
In June 2015, his play, The Red Lion, opened at the National Theatre. [15]
In 2016 he directed a revival of Tom Stoppard's play Travesties at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London which, after a sell-out run, transferred with the same cast to the Apollo Theatre in the West End. The revival was nominated for five Olivier Awards [16] and in spring 2018 it transferred to Broadway with Marber directing at the American Airlines Theatre. [17] [18]
Marber's theatre directing credits include Blue Remembered Hills by Dennis Potter, (National Theatre), The Old Neighbourhood by David Mamet, (Royal Court Theatre, London) and The Caretaker by Harold Pinter, (Comedy Theatre, London). In 2004, Marber was Cameron Mackintosh Professor of Contemporary Theatre at Oxford University. [19]
He directed Tom Stoppard's play Leopoldstadt , set in the Jewish community of early 20th-century Vienna, which premiered at Wyndham's Theatre in 2020. [20] The play closed during the pandemic and re-opened on 7 August 2021 for a 12 week run, ending on 30 October 2021. [21] Leopoldstadt had its North American premiere at the Longacre Theatre on Broadway on 2 October 2022, with Marber directing, for which he won the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play. [22] He directed Alan Bennett’s Habeas Corpus from 3 December 2021 to 26 February 2022 at the Menier Chocolate Factory; the run was also delayed because of the pandemic. [23]
Marber was a director of Lewes FC, driving forward a scheme for the club to be community owned from July 2010. [24]
Since 2002, Marber has been married to actress Debra Gillett. They have three children.
Television (incomplete)As writer
As director
TheatreAs writer
As director
FilmAs writer
Related Research ArticlesSir Tom Stoppard is a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter. He has written for film, radio, stage, and television, finding prominence with plays. His work covers the themes of human rights, censorship, and political freedom, often delving into the deeper philosophical thematics of society. Stoppard has been a playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation. He was knighted for his contribution to theatre by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997. Educating Rita is a stage comedy by British playwright Willy Russell. It is a play for two actors set entirely in the office of an Open University tutor. Travesties is a 1974 play by Tom Stoppard. It centres on the figure of Henry Carr, an old man who reminisces about Zürich in 1917 during the First World War, and his interactions with James Joyce when he was writing Ulysses, Tristan Tzara during the rise of Dada, and Lenin leading up to the Russian Revolution, all of whom were living in Zürich at that time. Shirley Valentine is a one-character play by Willy Russell. Taking the form of a monologue by a middle-aged, working class Liverpool housewife, it focuses on her life before and after a transforming holiday abroad. After Miss Julie is a 1995 play by Patrick Marber which relocates August Strindberg's naturalist tragedy, Miss Julie (1888), to an English country house in July 1945. The re-imagining of the events of Strindberg's original are transposed to the night of the British Labour Party's "landslide" election victory. Wyndham's Theatre is a West End theatre, one of two opened by actor/manager Charles Wyndham. 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The Menier Chocolate Factory is a 180-seat off-West End theatre, which comprises a bar and theatre offices. Stephen Wight is an English actor. He won the Milton Shulman Award for Outstanding Newcomer at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards for his performances in Don Juan in Soho (2007) at the Donmar Warehouse, He was nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award for his performance in Dealer's Choice (2007). Paul Keating is an English actor. He has been nominated twice for an Olivier Award for his performances on the West End stage. He began acting at the age of 12, appearing as Gavroche in Les Misérables at The Palace Theatre for 10 months. Privates on Parade: A Play with Songs in Two Acts is a 1977 farce by English playwright Peter Nichols, with music by Denis King. The drama draws upon Nichols' own experiences in the real-life Combined Services Entertainment, the postwar successor to ENSA, Entertainments National Service Association. The play is noteworthy for, inter alia, a series of musical numbers, performed by the male lead, parodying the style of such performers as Noël Coward, Marlene Dietrich and Carmen Miranda. Michael Jibson is an English actor, director, writer and voice over artist. He was the winner of the 2018 Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role in a Musical, for his role of King George III in Hamilton. He was nominated for the 2003 Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Musical, for Our House. David Leveaux is a British theatre director who has been nominated for five Tony Awards as director of both plays and musicals. He directs in the UK, working at the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Almeida Theatre, and the Donmar Warehouse, on Broadway, and also in Tokyo. Sam Buntrock is an English stage director. Mark Brokaw is an American theatre director. He won the Drama Desk Award, Obie Award and Lucille Lortel Award as Outstanding Director of a Play for How I Learned to Drive. The 2010 Evening Standard Theatre Awards were announced on 29 November 2010. The shortlist was revealed on 22 November 2010 and the longlist on 25 October 2010. The Evening Standard Theatre Awards were announced on November 24, 2008. The longlist was revealed on November 4, 2008 and the shortlist on November 7, 2008. Katherine Kingsley is an English actress. Leopoldstadt is a dramatic stage play written by British playwright Sir Tom Stoppard. The original production premiered on 25 January 2020 at Wyndham's Theatre in London's West End. The play is set among the wealthy Jewish community in Vienna, in the first half of the 20th century and follows the lives of "a prosperous Jewish family who had fled the pogroms in the East". References
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