Analysis
Patrick Marber’s three plays are unique in style; he writes using few sustained monologues or lengthy speeches. The playwright does not like set dramatic speeches and prefers improvisation, wit, and zippy exchanges. In his plays, Marber portrays back-and-forth interactions and the give-and-take quickness of relationships among close groups of friends, lovers, family members, and business partners. He has a dark, comedic, and pessimistic view of human nature and relationships. The playwright’s background as a stand-up comic and television writer and actor gives a freshness and clarity to his plays. His plays, at times shockingly frank, are not appropriate for younger audiences because of their explicit sexual discussions and use of profanity. However, Marber’s plays have touched a nerve in their accurate account of the lives of working-class young urbanites struggling to find meaning in the modern world.
Dealer’s Choice
In the preface to the published edition, Marber comments that he wrote the first draft of Dealer’s Choice at night in one week of early January, 1994. At the time he wrote the play, Marber did not answer the telephone, and he left his apartment only to walk the dog or buy cigarettes, rarely speaking to anybody. Then, the playwright spent a year revising, rewriting, and re-creating the play with the assistance of other actors, stage managers, friends, and theater patrons. The play emerged from improvisational work Marber did with a group of actors at the National Theatre in London. The published version that appeared in 1995 was the seventh draft of the original play, and Marber planned to revise the play when it was produced again.
Dealer’s Choice is a somber and bleak comedy about a father and son, compulsive gambling, relations among friends, business deals, deceit, and human trust. Poker is the metaphor for life that runs throughout the play. The six characters Mugsy, Sweeney, Stephen, Frankie, Carl, and Ash appear in a split set in Stephen’s restaurant in London. On the stage, the characters’ interaction is divided between a kitchen and the restaurant itself. Stephen owns the restaurant, Sweeney is the cook, and Mugsy and Frankie are the waiters. Carl is Stephen’s happy-go-lucky son, and they have had a troubled relationship over the years.
The play takes place one Sunday evening and the following Monday morning. The joking and jesting friends discuss the art of card playing with the necessary wisecracking, bluffing, gamesmanship, and boasting that goes along with working-class men enjoying their pastimes. In many ways, the play is about male power relationships and how men attempt to recruit and deceive others, even their friends and family, to realize their dreams and win the game. These men have difficulty expressing emotions openly, so they hide behind the bravado and tense emotions of the poker game.
The friends have gathered every Sunday night for years for a ritual game in the basement beneath Stephen’s restaurant. There is a special intensity and uneasiness to the card game on this particular night. The professional gambler Ash shows up to collect Carl’s unpaid gambling debt of four thousand pounds that Ash lent to Carl for poker, roulette, and blackjack. Carl had asked his father Stephen for money so that he could start his own restaurant business, but Carl is too much of a compulsive gambler and a malcontent to actually run a restaurant. Stephen is unaware that Carl has incurred large debts, and he tries to talk Carl into continuing to work for him. The climax of the play takes place during the emotional power struggle between Stephen and his directionless son. Stephen tells Mugsy, “I have to tell you that...
(This entire section contains 1655 words.)
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I think my son is the last person in the world anybody should go into business with.” Stephen has tried to counsel his son and make him part of the family business while Carl has tried to lead the life of a professional gambler. When Ash confronts Carl, he says he cannot pay the debt. Stephen loses his temper over his son’s bad fortunes, but Ash offers to flip a coin to decide on the debt. Ash flips the coin and wins the money. Carl yells at his father for trying to protect him and living in the illusion of power with his little weekly poker game. As Carl leaves, he asks if the poker game will be at the same time next week. Nothing has changed except for the characters gaining some insight into the power relationships around them.
Closer
Marber’s second play concerns the state of sexual relationships in late twentieth century London. The central issue of Closer is the difference between superficial lust and unconditional love between men and women. All the major characters experience a complex web of love, physical intimacy, desire, and betrayal. The play describes an emotional and sexual battleground and the disturbed and confused emotions that come out of being deceived. For mature audiences only, Closer holds nothing back with its detailed accounts of adulterous relations and computer chat room pornography. Marber’s play confronts, shocks, and cajoles the audience into accepting the barren reality that modern “morality” has produced.
The four main characters are Dan, a newspaper reporter responsible for the obituary section; Alice, a professional adult entertainer; Anna, a photographer; and Larry, a physician who specializes in dermatology. Each character ends up betraying at least one other person because of lust. Dan meets Alice when he sees her sitting on a park bench with a wounded, bleeding leg. Alice has been hit by a taxicab. While waiting at the hospital with Dan, Alice inspects the contents of Dan’s briefcase and notices that the crusts of his sandwich have been cut off. She asks him if his mother used to cut off his crusts, and she falls in love with Dan as she relates her own family history to him. Alice tells Dan about her career as a professional stripper who knows why men are drawn to exotic entertainment clubs. Dan leaves his girlfriend, Ruth, for Alice over the course of a year, and then Dan writes a novel about Alice’s colorful past life. However, when Dan meets the photographer Anna, who has been hired to take a photo for the jacket of his book about Alice, he is instantly smitten by Anna and asks to see her again. Dan and Anna kiss each other and try to experience some emotional intimacy while Alice is traveling to the studio in order to meet Dan. Next, Alice overhears the emotion-laced conversation between Dan and Anna, and she confronts Anna, whom she accuses of trying to steal Dan away.
Frustrated by the turbulent emotions that he is feeling and torn between Alice and Anna, Dan pretends to be a woman in a pornographic computer chat room exchange. Using the skills that Alice has taught him, Dan meets Larry and convinces Larry to meet him in a public park. Larry thinks that he is about to meet a woman named “Anna.” The real Anna, the photographer, coincidentally happens by the same park, and she meets Larry in place of Dan. While married to Larry, Anna has an affair with Dan for almost a year before telling her husband. The chaos and attempts at normalcy do not work. The title of the play, Closer, becomes ironic as the audience realizes that modern people with superficial ties to each other do not have the ability to experience intimacy. Because she is unable to live with the truth, Alice commits suicide at the end of the play. The other characters discover that Alice had stolen her name and biography from a memorial to someone else. Alice could not get “closer” to anyone because she was living a lie.
Howard Katz
Marber’s third play continues with the dark, spare, and combative dialogue style of his earlier work. The main character, Howard Katz, is a Jewish entertainment executive who has recently turned fifty, an event that has signaled a major downturn in his life. The play centers on the psychological decline of the protagonist, whose mental torment and anguish spills over from his work to his family. This is more than a routine midlife crisis. Howard is detached, depressed, and unable to find meaning in his work. He denounces the shallow values of the entertainment world and his dislike for egotistical managers and untalented performers. Howard questions the value of the relationships that have defined his life. The eponymous hero falls deeper and deeper into a self-destructive downward spiral, seemingly unable to explain the object of his search. Howard’s existential anguish is similar to Willy Loman’s self-doubt in Arthur Miller’s classic play Death of a Salesman (pr., pb. 1949).
The play is enacted inside Howard’s head as he sits on a nondescript park bench contemplating suicide. The gloomy attraction of flirting with self-destruction is a theme right out of Dealer’s Choice and Closer. This spare set of Howard Katz resembles Samuel Beckett’s En attendant Godot (pb. 1952, pr. 1953; Waiting for Godot, 1954), a classic of the Theater of the Absurd. While reviewing the course of his life, Howard gets angry with his wife, father, mother, and brother, and he has flashback conversations with them. When Howard’s wife explains that she is content with everything they have in their marriage and home, he backs away in disgust, unable to give voice to his numbness and anger. Howard begins to vent his frustration at everyone around him, putting his career at risk and alienating his friends and family. Howard’s descent into the abyss of doubt and depression is a strange kind of search for faith that he resolves at the end of the play, finally saying that he wants to learn how to live. He does not commit suicide to rid himself of his internal demons. Howard Katz emerges from his deep depression in trying to reconstruct his life.