Sex, death and Soho

Patrick Marber is looking admiringly at a shagpile rug in the Donmar Warehouse bar. 'That's Don Juan's rug,' he says, proudly. 'I wonder whether it's real fur?' We touch it. 'Hmm. Rather oily. Let's not go there. Who knows what might have taken place on it...'

If Don Juan has had anything to do with it, probably rather a lot. Moliere's 17th-century rogue, a shameless Lothario who devotes his life to carnal pleasure and endless conquest, simply refuses to die, which is ironic, given his fate in the play.

The story of his rapacious sexual appetite and disregard for social convention has been constantly reinvented throughout the centuries, and there are at least 1,700 versions of the story, to which Marber has just added another with Don Juan In Soho.

'I'm glad I didn't know there were so many versions when I was writing it,' he says. 'It would've scared the living daylights out of me. Although I do know none is set in Soho, which is something.'

Marber was supposed to deliver a new play to the Donmar earlier this year, but that didn't quite happen. 'I'm very slow,' he admits, sheepishly. So artistic director Michael Grandage suggested he write a souped-up 21st-century adaptation of Don Juan instead, with Rhys Ifans in the title role. ('He's perfect! So saturnine!' says Marber).

In fact, Moliere's strange, anarchic satire is the perfect vehicle for Marber, whose early career saw him garner writing and performing credits on TV comedy shows such as The Day Today, Coogan's Run and Knowing Me, Knowing You With Alan Partridge but who has always been drawn to the darker excesses of male behaviour in his own plays: Dealer's Choice, Closer (his zeitgeist-defining smash hit about the perfidious love lives of four thirtysomethings, turned into a film) and Howard Katz.

With Don Juan, he wanted to explore how Don Juan's relentless pursuit of sex is also a sort of death wish. 'My Don Juan is dancing on his own grave,' he says. 'I wanted to capture the idea that if he doesn't keep finding new conquests then he'll cease to exist. At one point, he says: "A good f**k is worth dying for." It's only a comedy. But that's basically what it's about.'

Sex and death have always been very close in Marber's work, something that intriguingly belies his sunny, straightforward-seeming persona. (He used to have a reputation for being prickly, which seems odd.) Moreover, he has always excelled at anatomising the way men bury themselves beneath a performance, be it sex, bravado or lies. This is in strong contrast to the flamboyantly amoral Don Juan, of course, who is flagrant about the fact he isn't hiding anything at all. 'It's true all my characters are involved in this game - and if you lose the game, you die. Don Juan is consistent in that respect but everyone else I've written is trying to find a way of living that makes sense. Whereas this guy has already found it, and he's absolutely in contact with his centre, or lack of centre. It's very pleasing to write a protagonist who knows what he wants. Most of my characters have been very confused.'

Most of his characters have also either reflected Marber's own life or have inhabited a parallel universe to it. Dealer's Choice was fed by his experience as a gambling addict in his early 20s; he wrote Closer while falling in love with his wife, Debra Gillett, and he's always said he wrote Howard Katz, about a man having a mid-life crisis, as a warning to himself.

'I can only write about something in me that's impossible to resist. I'm so not a Don Juan now; I'm married with three children but there's this other fantasy world direction in which my life might have gone and I want to know what it might have been like.'