Patrick Marber: The crying game

Even for a writer accustomed to being in demand, the last few months have been exceptional for Patrick Marber. New Yorkers are watching the US premiere of his play Howard Katz, with Alfred Molina as the suicidally disenchanted showbiz agent. His deft, blackly comic script for Richard Eyre's Notes on a Scandal, based on Zoë Heller's novel about an art teacher's affair with a teenage pupil, helped Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett give Oscar-nominated performances, while Marber collected Oscar and Bafta nods for Best Adapted Screenplay.

At the Donmar Warehouse last December Michael Grandage directed the premiere of Marber's characteristically bruising and hilarious adaptation of Molière, Don Juan in Soho, with Rhys Ifans as 21st-century London's most prodigious seducer; an Olivier nomination for Best New Comedy followed.

Though the nominations brought no trophies, and some of his admirers long for him to deliver a new play, Marber, 42, is still on a roll - he's adapting Ian McEwan's novel Saturday for the screen and awaiting productions of Don Juan in Soho in Athens, Stockholm, Mexico City, Belgrade, Helsinki and Prague. All this comes on the eve of a significant anniversary for the writer.

On 22 May, it will be exactly 10 years since the first performance at the Cottesloe Theatre of Closer, Marber's most artistically and commercially successful work: greeted by full houses and Olivier, Critics' Circle and Time Out awards for Best New Play, and subsequently staged in more than 100 cities worldwide; this spring alone there are productions in Northampton, Madrid, Prague, Vienna, Budapest and Mexico City. The 2004 film version, with Mike Nichols directing Marber's Bafta-nominated script, took more than $115m (£57m).

Back in 1997, Marber's direction perfectly exploited the Cottesloe's intimacy and Ciaran Hinds, Clive Owen, Sally Dexter and Liza Walker made up the formidably sexy quartet enmeshed in Closer's criss-crossing, London-set tale of doomed affairs. It confirmed the promise of his debut play, Dealer's Choice (Cottesloe, 1995), and cemented his solo reputation after several years of acclaimed team-work; he emerged from the stand-up comedy circuit to collaborate with Armando Iannucci and Steve Coogan, as a co-writer and performer for radio and television on news spoofs On the Hour and The Day Today and spoof chat-show Knowing Me, Knowing You... with Alan Partridge.

Closer also emphasized that Marber is very much a London writer, the capital providing the backdrop to Dealer's Choice, Closer, Howard Katz, Don Juan in Soho, Notes on a Scandal and, soon, Saturday. The city is, in effect, Closer's fifth character, and when he was writing and staging the play, Marber, walking his dog every day, would pass the Postman's Park memorial in London that had such a symbolic role in the script, and in the Cottesloe production design.

Closer's account of sexual betrayal amongst characters his own age led Marber to be asked if it contained veiled autobiography, especially as Dealer's Choice's dramatisation of a poker night at a London restaurant had drawn heavily on his gambling sessions during and after his days reading English at Oxford. "The trite answer is that everything [in Closer] is true but none of it happened," he told one interviewer in 1999. "The events aren't true of my life, though I've experienced most of the emotions."

In late 1996, when he developed Closer in workshops at the National Theatre Studio and wrote a first full-length draft in Co Monaghan, Ireland, Marber had yet to marry the actress Debra Gillett, with whom he now has three sons. He then viewed single life in London as "a fucking jungle". Closer was his attempt to say: "This is what it's like", a picture of the pleasure, cruelty and casualties of sexual love perhaps best encapsulated in the play's most frequently quoted line: Larry describes the human heart as "a fist wrapped in blood". Theatregoers of both sexes wrote to tell Marber: "You've written my life. How did you know?"

Interviewing him at length for a new student edition of the play, however, I found that in retracing the steps that took him to Closer you glean much less from speculation about his romantic history than from examining how the play's take on chance, love, sex, death, class and identity was influenced by other playwrights, an American film-maker and a Manchester pop group.

Closer's 12 scenes span four-and-a-half years, during which "reserved" obituarist Dan falls in love with "disarming", waif-like waitress and stripper Alice . In an online chatroom, Dan tricks Larry, a dermatologist with caveman tendencies, into visiting the London Zoo Aquarium for a casual hook-up with a fictitious woman, Anna, only for Larry to meet the real Anna, the photographer who took the jacket portrait for Dan's first novel. Larry and Anna marry, but part when, in a dazzlingly theatrical dual break-up scene, she reveals that she's been sleeping with Dan and Dan confesses to Alice. Alice and Larry have a brief affair before Anna and Larry and Dan and Alice get back together, then separate again. The final scene reveals the truth about Alice's identity, and that she's been killed by a car in New York.

This meticulous construction drew on the four-handed comedy and exchanged partners of Noël Coward's Private Lives and, more immediately, Craig Raine's verse drama 1953, a version of Racine's Andromaque, which Marber directed at the Almeida in Februrary 1996. Raine transposes the action from the aftermath of the Trojan War to Rome in 1953, when Hitler and Mussolini have won the war. Hitler's envoy Orestes arrives in Rome to demand from Vittorio Mussolini the release of an English prisoner, Angus, and encourages Vittorio to marry the German princess, Ira, with whom Orestes has had a passionate affair. Vittorio loves Angus's mother, Annette, and tragedy ensues. 1953 is, like Closer, dominated by intense one-on-ones between two men, two women and, in particular, a man and a woman.

A few months earlier, Marber had adapted and directed Strindberg's Miss Julie for BBC2 as After Miss Julie, shown in November 1995. He made no significant changes to the plot, but changed some names, the location and period to Anglicise the mistress-servant power struggle: late 19th-century Sweden became England on the night of Labour's 1945 landslide victory. "Doing the Strindberg gave me territory for a play about contemporary sexual relationships," explains Marber. "I daresay there's a touch of Miss Julie in Closer's Alice. Both are carnal creatures and know it, both are shockingly confident and insecure simultaneously."

Closer owes even more to Soderbergh. In Steven Soderbergh's Palme d'Or-winning Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989), the introverted Anne is married to cocksure lawyer John, who is screwing Anne's sister, the extrovert Cynthia. When John's friend, the alienated Graham, visits, Anne is drawn to him and leaves her husband for him. "I saw Sex, Lies... when it came out," Marber recalls, "and just thought that this was a voice I hadn't heard before, very shocking and very contemporary. Soderbergh did something accurate, and haunting, simultaneously realistic and poetic, and I always like that." Both writers were interested in technology's impact on sexuality. The otherwise impotent Graham relies on his video recordings of women talking about sex to achieve orgasm; until he meets Anne, he cannot cope with physical or emotional contact. Almost a decade later, Marber used the wildly funny and unnerving cyberspace encounter between Dan and Larry to show the internet's potential for explicitness without intimacy.

Marber is also a great admirer of David Mamet, whose Sexual Perversity in Chicago (1974) adds another branch to the Closer family tree. In Sexual Perversity, desk jockeys Bernard, a promiscuous misogynist, and Danny, his softer friend, talk about tits and pussy. Danny co-habits with commercial artist Deborah, much to the annoyance of her teacher friend Joan. Mamet and Marber's dialogue is terse, characters mostly exchanging staccato single or half-lines, and the profanity exists not to shock but because this is how these characters talk about sex.

Next comes a writer revered equally by Mamet and Marber: Harold Pinter. As writers and directors, all three are masters of exploiting the space between the lines, and, more specifically, Closer's use of time is indebted to Pinter's Betrayal (1978), whose nine scenes trace the adulterous affair between Jerry, a literary agent, and Emma, an art gallery owner married to Jerry's best friend, Robert. Pinter tells the story largely in reverse chronological order, from 1977, when Jerry and Emma meet after a two-year gap, to 1968, when Jerry first tells Emma of his passion. In Closer, Marber chooses pivotal moments divided by as little as a day and as much as 18 months; its last scene mirrors Betrayal's first and its first mirrors Betrayal's last.

Marber's oldest dramatic source helped shape Closer's third and fourth scenes. The setting up of Larry in the internet chatroom and then the pay-off at the Aquarium, when he meets the bemused Anna rather than the voracious Anna, involve a brilliant fusion of 1990s technology and 400-year-old stagecraft, delivering the same comic punch as Shakespeare did in Twelfth Night. Dan's assumption of Anna's identity reworks Viola's disguise as Cesario, and he tricks Larry exactly as Maria and Co dupe Malvolio.

Where, finally, does the Manchester pop music scene fit into this creative jigsaw? Marber stole the play's title from Joy Division's despair-filled second album, Closer, released in 1980, after their lead singer, Ian Curtis, had killed himself. Marber loved the band in his teens, and as Closer was their second album and his second play decided against a title like "Love and Other Miseries", because he "wanted it to resonate outwards". Closer is a perfect label, embracing the four lovers' contrasting searches for physical and emotional closeness, and their awareness that every day brings us closer to death.

Closer proves that, like many other gifted writers, Marber "steals" from the best. His own, distinctive voice drew imaginatively on earlier works to produce a play that speaks to his and older and younger generations, rooted in his experiences of love and London, but embraced by people in more than 100 other cities. "Closer can be looked at as Sexual Perversity in Chicago or Sex, Lies and Videotape rewritten. I mean they're all the same play, really," he concludes. "Each successive generation needs to go: 'No, no, this is where love is at the moment'. I was lucky enough that Closer was one of the plays that was doing that [when] I wrote it."

Patrick Marber will be in conversation with Daniel Rosenthal for 'Closer: Ten Years On' at the NT Cottesloe, Londonon 27 April at 6pm (020 7452 30000; nationaltheatre.org.uk). 'Closer' is at the Theatre Royal, Northampton, from 25 May to 16 June (01604 624 811). 'The Student Edition of Closer' is published by Methuen, £8.99