Anna made her Broadway début in Spring 1999 in Patrick Marber's
hit comedy Closer, a performance that won her the 1999 Drama Desk
award for Best Supporting Actress in a Play. Anna's only
other true professional stage appearance had been in
Harold
Pinter's
one-nighter some 18 months earlier, making the award even more
remarkable.
I actually saw the play myself. I had a short break in the Big Apple in
May that year, and wasn't about to miss the opportunity to see Anna on stage while I was
there. Her performance was just perfect for the part,
and the audience reaction to her was electric. While the standing ovation
for the cast at the end was enthusiastic and genuine, the roars of approval that
erupted for Anna as she took her individual bows were more reminiscent of a
football crowd celebrating a goal.
Closer ran from 25
March to 9 September 1999 at the Music Box Theater, 239 W. 45th St., New York.
This page records the reviews of the main Broadway art critics on the production
itself and, as you'll see, they were very complimentary about the play in general and
about Anna in particular. Many thanks to one of the
Homage Page's regular visitors John Patton, who tracked down and submitted
these reviews to the
site.
'CLOSER' ENCOUNTERS
By DONALD LYONS, New York Post
"CLOSER'' is a smart, sexy and sublimely funny play about desire and love and the
painful ways these two urges are not always in synch.
Patrick Marber's 1997 London comedy hit is getting a dream production at the Music Box
Theater. Directed with edge and tension by Marber himself, the crisp cast consists
of Natasha Richardson as photographer Anna, Anna Friel as stripper Alice, Rupert Graves as
obituary writer Dan and Ciaran Hinds as dermatologist Larry. The drolly minimalist
sets by Vicki Mortimer are practically characters in themselves.
This is Marber's second play. His first, ''Dealer's Choice,'' about gamblers,
showed, in the rhythms of its talk and its obsession with power games, the influence of
David Mamet. ''Closer,'' too, is Mametian - at least in the way its male characters
treat sex as power. There's a flavor, also, of Paul Schrader, writer of ''Taxi
Driver'' and ''Raging Bull,'' in the insistence by the men that the women reveal details
of sexual encounters. But, at least in the first act, Marber has softened the Mamet
notes with a wit, warmth and wisdom all his own.
This is a play of powerful emotional accuracy; anyone who's ever been in a relationship
will find himself (and maybe herself) laughing with recognition. In its sharp savvy
about the ways of desire, ''Closer'' is closer to Schnitzler than to the hollow and nasty
''The Blue Room'' by David Hare, which called itself an adaptation of Schnitzler's ''La
Ronde.'' No bottoms are bared in ''Closer,'' just hearts - and that's infinitely
more shocking.
Anna Friel bursts over the Broadway sky like a bombshell as Alice, a feral young waif full
of street sass and mystery. Flirtatious, pert, pretty and boyish-looking (she has a
very funny line about men's attraction to boyish women, but, like 99 percent of the play,
it's unquotable here), Friel's Alice is both available and elusive, an odd creature who
has an odd penchant for getting into motor accidents. I don't buy all the secrets
Marber piles on the character of Alice, but Friel, who was seen on PBS in ''Our Mutual
Friend,'' is never less than magnetic.
Rupert Graves, who's been in a bunch of E.M. Forster adaptations, is masterful and
perversely likable as the selfish, seductive Dan. In the way of bright London guys,
Dan can articulate his lusts and rationalize his betrayals with self-deprecating charm and
sweetness. Alice and Dan meet cute: He takes her to a hospital when she's hit by a
cab. The doctor at the hospital is Larry, played by Ciaran Hinds as a simple, open,
vulnerable, working-class man, in a way an eternal victim of others' cunning but blessed
with a gutsy survivor's vigor.
Bellowing like a shot elephant through his gash of a mouth, Hinds bravely presents Larry's
pain unmediated by irony. The jacket photo for Dan's novel is being taken by Anna,
who, though he's involved with Alice and though he's sort of set her up with Larry, he
callously pursues.
Natasha Richardson's Anna has a sort of sad wariness about her, as if expecting life (or
rather men) to break her heart. But Anna is also a toughly hilarious cookie, and
Richardson, tossing that blond mane, is mistress of the surprised pause, of the ironic
silence. When the paranoid Alice asks Anna if she's stolen Dan's soul, Anna, after a
dry beat, says, ''Do you want some tea?''. Richardson's is a quiet but
heart-breaking turn.
Anna and Larry meet cute, too, in an aquarium. They've been duped by Dan in an
ingeniously comic and completely silent scene where the two men are on a sex line. Dan
pretends to be a horny female slut; Larry is taken in; the stage is dominated by a big
blue screen, whereon the manipulator and the manipulated create sex language.
It's a clever allegory, in miniature, of play-writing itself. ''All the language is old,
there are no new words,'' Dan says in a scene in which Dan and Anna are leaving their
lovers for each other, putting the two parallel events in the same space. The
couples intermingle without noticing the other. Later, as the Dan-Anna couple is
dissolving, Marber plays games with time. But these Ayckbourn-like tricks are not
the play's strengths, which lie rather in sex-war insights such as Larry's ''You don't
understand the territory because you are the territory,'' and Anna's sensationally
insightful explanation of the difference between women's and men's emotional ''baggage.''
Marber is still growing as a writer, but he has a voice - one that's a pleasure to tune in
to.
''Closer,'' by Patrick Marber. With Natasha Richardson, Rupert Graves, Anna Friel and
Ciaran Hinds. Directed by Patrick Marber. Sets by Vicki Mortimer. At the
Music Box Theater, 239 W. 45th St.; (212) 239-6200.
New York Daily News
Love's Labor's Lost
Cynical sex drama 'Closer' leaves no room for hope
It used to be that the easiest thing for a playwright was to get all sentimental.
Love, arriving in the happy ending, would conquer all. But now, sentiment is
a sin. The easy way out is black despair. But is it any more truthful than the
feel-good versions it has replaced? Patrick Marber's "Closer" suggests
that it isn't. In this play about sex and relationships, the one thing that cannot
be admitted is the possibility of happiness.
"Closer" comes from the British National Theater in London, where it won all the
major awards for Best Play last year. It's not hard to see why. The play is
slick, skillful and fashionably bleak. Under Marber's impressive direction, it has a
confidence and coherence that place it well above the average comedy of modern manners.
Marber's dialogue is sharp and witty. He wrings, at times, a surreal black
humor from the most terrible situations. Taking two men and two women, he works
through the variations of their mutual loves and loathings, attractions and betrayals,
with extraordinary assurance.
First, there is the fragile, waif-like Alice, falling for Dan, a shy young man who writes
obituaries for a newspaper. For a time, he takes over her life, writing a novel in
which she is the central character. Then he falls at first sight for Anna, a
beautiful photographer. She, in turn, marries Larry, a dermatologist. And from
then on, it's a game of pass-the-lover. Anna betrays Larry with Dan. Dan
betrays Alice with Anna. Larry takes up with Alice. And on and on.
All of this is done with energy and ingenuity. But after a while, it gets hard to
care about the outcome of a merely mathematical game. For the play lacks a basic
ingredient: a sense that things might have been different. Drama is about choices,
turning points, mistakes. "Closer" doesn't have any.
Toward the end of the play, Anna and Alice actually discuss this, and agree that they
chose their fatal attractions. But the problem is that we didn't see this happening
at the time. In order to do so, we would have to believe that these people had
possibilities — one of them being that they might actually love each other. And this
Marber seems unable to imagine. Without it, it is difficult — even for the
stellar cast — to achieve any real depth of emotion.
Each of the actors creates a completely convincing character. Natasha Richardson is
elegant as Anna, Rupert Graves charming as Dan, Anna Friel appealing as Alice and Ciaran
Hinds volcanic as Larry. But the script gives none of them the room to make those
characters change and grow before our eyes; Marber is too intent on easy pessimism to
allow that to happen.
In the end, "Closer" is too satisfied with its own dark vision to risk any real
emotion. That makes it ultimately as cold and self-absorbed as its characters.
A Come-Hither 'Closer'
By PATRICIA O'HAIRE
Daily News Staff Writer
A playwright can find his inspiration anywhere. Patrick Marber's idea for his new
play, "Closer," which opens on Broadway March 25, came to him at an Atlanta
strip joint.
It was three years ago, and Marber's first play, "Dealer's Choice," had opened
at the Manhattan Theater Club. Then the troupe was invited to be part of the Olympic
celebration in Atlanta, and one night after the show, the all-male cast decided to take a
little R&R at a nearby strip club — of which Atlanta has plenty. Marber went
along, and a new play was born.
"That was definitely the starting point of the play," he said in an interview.
"I began to think, who are these girls who became strippers? Most of
them forge their identities, so I began exploring the idea of someone who concealed her
identity in real life as well. "I began to think that the character, when she
is most disguised, is when she is most herself. The others, I knew fairly early on,
would be people who had relationships with each other at various times. Four seemed
to be a good number. The people meet each other, get together, split apart, join
with others, get together. It's kind of a messy dance."
Marber may deem it "messy" — but London theater critics said it was
sexually charged, sensual and fascinating. They showered it with last year's three
top prizes for drama — the Olivier, the Evening Standard and the Critics' Circle
awards. In New York, "Closer" — which he also directed — stars
Natasha Richardson, Rupert Graves, Anna Friel and Ciaran Hinds. Audiences will see
them weave in and out of relationships with one another in a seemingly bloodless fashion
— looking for love with all the wrong partners. The characters are so
incredibly candid about their exploits that one almost feels embarrassed for them —
yet it's a fascinating spectacle.
"I know people think they're brutally frank to each other, but in the play they're
pushed to extremes," Marber says. "You never see these people just hanging
out, relaxing. You never see the middle of the relationships, so it only seems to be
about these incredibly brutal, frank people. But they're not — they're in the
extremes — the beginnings and ends of affairs, the boring bits cut out. Had I
shown you their always having a good time together, there wouldn't be a play."
Marber, 34, is a London native with an Oxford degree in English literature who enjoys
gambling (blackjack and poker) and who came to playwriting in a roundabout way: Four years
after he left the university, he was a standup comic. "I worked comedy clubs,
doing my own material," Marber recalls. "Generally, my stuff was surreal,
quite opposite to the humor in my plays. Maybe it was the more lunatic side of my
personality coming out. I never really expected to be a playwright. I simply took up
a pen and began to write."
"Closer" has gone through different phases and stages, but its substance hasn't
changed. "I find audiences here quicker than Londoners," he says.
"I thought I'd have to change things for here, make it more . . . I don't know
what. Audiences seem to get the jokes quicker, which is nice. "I'm happy
with the response in the previews — people laughing in the right places, getting
shocked in the right places and being very lively."
Lies in Fiction Can Be True
By Linda Winer
Newsday staff writer
CLOSER. Written and directed by Patrick Marber. With Natasha
Richardson, Rupert Graves, Anna Friel, Ciaran Hinds. Sets and costumes by Vicki
Mortimer, lights by Hugh Vanstone. Royal National Theatre production at the Music
Box, 45th Street west of Broadway. Seen at Tuesday's preview.
WHAT A NASTY bit of work is "Closer" - nasty, dirty-talking, loveless and, oh,
yes, riveting erotic theater. It also happens to be a lot less meaningful or
important than its author-director Patrick Marber and its wheelbarrows of recent London
awards would have us believe. Chances are, however, audiences will be too seduced -
or, in sensitive cases, bludgeoned - by its hard-edged sexual politics and electrifying
actors to notice the emptiness, until the darkly funny, aggressively unromantic comedy is
over.
And that's OK. Indeed, "Closer," which opened at the Music Box last night
in the Royal National Theatre production and a new cast, is a slick kick - even if we
can't guarantee you'll respect yourself in the morning for admiring it. Marber,
whose neater but less textured "Dealer's Choice" had a brief run recently at
Manhattan Theatre Club, has written a lean, brutal, four-character study of '90s
relationships in which the pursuit of truth is the biggest lie. He also has written
Broadway's best - also its first - adventure in cybersex. Odd how much more shocking
X-rated flirtations seem when typed on a humungous computer screen above an old-fashioned
Broadway stage.
Marber's subjects are love, abandonment and death, but his material is sex. Rather
than bringing people "closer," his couplings ultimately just reinforce
humanity's aloneness. These characters - played with exquisite honesty by Natasha
Richardson, Rupert Graves, Anna Friel and Ciaran Hinds - talk about sensations with the
articulate blunt cruelty that's usually left in fiction to emotional subtext.
David Mamet's people use sex words as poetic metaphor. Marber uses them as sex.
In his world, kindness is the equivalent of boredom. And the most dogged seekers of
truth, naturally, are the biggest liars. The play peeks into key moments in four and
a half years of couples - don't look for classic dramatic unities here.
Marber, clearly a gifted director, deftly stages the courtships and betrayals in a
series of short, intelligent, staccato scenes - sometimes presented simultaneously, as if
on a split screen - on Vicki Mortimer's minimal and versatile set. A series of
mysterious rectangles are hung up and down the back wall like faceless paintings at a
museum. Their significance is a secret we won't ruin here. We can say, however, that
his recurring use of Postman's Park, a London memorial to martyrs who gave their lives to
save others, is as bogus and pretentious as anything spouted by his most self-deceptive
characters.
Marber, who reportedly got his inspiration from an upscale strip club in Atlanta, has put
his heart, such as it is, into the dangerously sentimental notion of the noble young
stripper. His Alice - played with a spectacular mixture of street smarts and
neediness by Anna Friel - carries the most freight. He gives her the self-knowledge
to mockingly refer to herself as a "waif," but also burdens her with the purest
soul around.
We first meet Alice and Dan (played with eviscerating boyish cruelty by Rupert Graves)
in a hospital emergency room. Although Alice never strikes us as the sort who
wanders carelessly into traffic, she has been hit by a car - apparently not the first
time, definitely not the last. She and Dan, an obituary writer and would-be
novelist, talk cute in linguistically self-conscious ways. The gash on her shin
matches the color of her shoes (sharp costumes also by Mortimer). Nice touch in a
play where a doctor describes the heart as "a fist wrapped in blood."
Richardson, back onstage after her Tony-winning breakthrough in "Cabaret," is
Anna, the photographer who shoots Dan's portrait for the novel he has apparently written
during the blackout between scenes. Anna may be Marber's least-fleshed-out
character, but we would never know it from Richardson's elegantly nuanced, surprisingly
physical performance. In the photo shoot, where Dan starts cheating on Alice,
Richardson moves with the slinky joy of a cocky professional. At her photo
exhibition, she's a bit tipsy. As the deceptions accumulate, her pointy, pouty,
intelligent face is unequivocally post-coital, then guilty, then weary. What a
pleasure she is.
Then there is Hinds, the only holdover from the London cast, balancing giddily on the thin
line between obnoxiously oily and pathetically likable. He plays Larry, the
dermatologist with decent political instincts and an appetite for rough sex. In his
chilling scene at Alice's strip club, he lashes out about the impossibility of sexual
understanding. You see, women "don't understand the territory," because
"they are the territory."
But Marber is too clever to stack the deck in favor of the women. They're hardly
more innocent than the men. Although Alice mouths cynical observations about what
men want from women, really, the women get a few bursts of hilarious insights that, at a
recent preview, made the audience applaud in recognition. This may not be a world we
care to recognize and, indeed, we're not sure even Marber believes the emptiness of it
all.
Alice describes Anna's photo exhibit as a lie because it makes the sad beautiful.
Marber makes the sad seductive. And it's nasty fun, even if we don't have to
buy it in the kinder - not necessarily boring - light of day.
THE ARTS/THEATER
APRIL 5, 1999 VOL. 153 NO. 13
Sex in the Trauma Ward
BY RICHARD ZOGLIN
What turns an actress on? If you're Natasha Richardson, scion of one of Britain's
most famous acting families (daughter of Vanessa Redgrave) and trying to carve your own
niche on the stage, playing Sally Bowles in a radically revamped version of Cabaret is one
sure way. Deciding how to follow up that Tony-winning turn, however, is a tougher
call.
Richardson twice turned down an offer to join the four-person Broadway cast of Patrick
Marber's hit London play Closer. Asked a third time, she thought it over for a
weekend and agreed — not because the role promised an acting breakthrough but simply
because she loved the play. "Writing like this," she says, "doesn't
come along that often."
Closer is a bruising dissection of modern relationships, in which sex is the subject
even when it's not, honesty is frequently not the best policy, and people with choices
almost always make the wrong one. The play opens with two characters in a hospital
waiting room. Alice, who works in a strip club, has been hit by a cab, and Dan, a
newspaper obit writer, has come to her rescue. The action never seems to leave the
trauma ward as the two pair up with each other and, eventually, with Larry, a straitlaced
doctor, and Anna, a stylish photographer.
Marber's icy dialogue has the timing of a TV sitcom and the lonely echo of a prison
cell. "Is there anyone you'd like to phone?" Alice is asked in the
hospital. "I don't know anyone," she replies. Marber, who doubles as
the director, places his characters in pools of light surrounded mostly by darkness.
Their isolation is symbolized further by the play's most startling and curious
scene: Dan lures Larry into a bogus rendezvous by posing as a sluttish girl in an Internet
chat room, their cyberencounter typed out on a giant computer screen onstage.
Closer is such a shrewd piece of contempo-realism that its shortcomings as drama might
be overlooked. Marber's tactic of eliding large chunks of time — people meet;
in the next scene they've been living together for months — stresses the impersonal
power of sex but robs the characters of human dimension. The cybersex scene is
clever but seems entirely detachable from the rest of the play. Like a skilled
hooker, Closer is satisfying mainly in the moment; as a lasting experience, it leaves
something to be desired.
Yet the cast makes it crackle. Ciaran Hinds (the only London holdover) smartly
navigates Larry's sometimes improbable swings of temperament; Rupert Graves is
pub-crawlingly plausible as Dan; and Anna Friel, as the waifish Alice, is the most
appealing new face on Broadway this season. Richardson invests Anna's elegant
exterior with shadows of vulnerability, delivers gag lines with dry panache and raises the
electricity level just by striding onstage.
What’s Love Got to Do With It?
Closer Makes It Sexy on Broadway
By John Heilpern
Closer, Patrick Marber’s hip drama of sex, lies and rabid heterosexuals, has
opened on Broadway following its sensational run in London, and I enjoyed this modern
amorality play of our time immensely.
It’s a pity, I think, that one or two reviewers regret that it apparently lacks
evidence of love and emotion when the piece is crucially about the absence of both.
Rather, Closer is a cool dark comedy of sexual desire and selfishness–and the
illusion of love. Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song, A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong; And I am Marie of Roumania.
Call Dorothy Parker an old cynic, if you must, but the lady would have appreciated the
cynical 90’s reality of Patrick Marber. In the first cybersex scene in theater
history, Dan–who’s pretending to be a girl–logs onto the Internet and
connects with a stranger named Larry: "Don’t be a pussy. Life without risk
is death. Desire, like the world, is an accident. The best sex is anonymous.
We live as we dream, ALONE. I’ll make you come like a train, Larry.
Tomorrow, 1 P.M. Where?" What’s love got to do with it?
The cybersex scene, projected onto a blue screen like a porn backdrop in space —
"Nice 2 meet U," "I love COCK" — had the audience in gales of
laughter, incidentally. All sexual fantasies made public are ridiculous — even
those kept private — particularly in this jokily obscene put-on.
But Mr. Marber’s wit shows up in unexpected places. The tightly written
episodes and duologues surprise us. We can never be certain what will happen next
between the quartet of lovers and users bouncing off each other in a chaos theory of
disconnected relationships. In its random circularity of sex and ultimate, loveless
dead end, Closer is a contemporary La Ronde (and Mr. Marber a young Arthur Schnitzler).
Yet this is only his second play. He’s a remarkably fresh, edgy talent,
considered to be the leading playwright of his generation in England. Certainly, I
prefer Closer’s dangerous, desperate reality–the cold narcissistic sluttishness
of it all–to Martin McDonagh’s whimsical tall tales of Ireland that get me down.
Mr. Marber’s first play, the poker-playing Dealer’s Choice in 1995, was
influenced by David Mamet, but he has since found his own voice. The
dramatist’s confident ear for compact, fizzing dialogue and its rhythmic
undercurrents is the most distinctly alive since Harold Pinter first burst on the scene.
"Sorry. I was looking for a cigarette," says Alice in the beguiling opening
lines of the play. She’s been looking in a stranger’s briefcase.
Seated on
a bench, she has a bloody cut on her leg. "I’ve given up," says Dan,
the stranger, declining the offer. He’s thirtysomething; she’s a punkish
waif in her 20’s. "Have you got to be somewhere?" she asks.
"Work. Didn’t fancy my sandwiches?" "I don’t eat
fish." "Why not?" "Fish piss in the sea."
"So do children." "I don’t eat children, either.
What’s your work?" "Journalism." "What
sort?" "Obituaries." "Do you like it … in the dying
business?" "It’s a living."
The assured, flirtatious opening is full of possibilities and suckers us into the
action. It possesses a smart surface urbanity that could be a clipped, chance
meeting from Noel Coward’s Private Lives in a coarser vernacular. But the two
characters could also be weirdly lying to each other in a world where words — what
you actually say — have lost all meaning and credibility. "What’s so
great about the truth?" Dan later protests. "Try lying for a change,
it’s the currency of the world."
Mr. Marber has also directed Closer, as he did in London, and on balance this is a
superior production to the fine one I saw at the Royal National Theater. The
ensemble, led by Natasha Richardson, is first-rate and perfectly balanced. Ms.
Richardson as Anna, a photographer of "sad strangers photographed beautifully,"
touches the heights in the graphic scene of blistering sexual jealousy that closes the
first act. She’s also deftly comic in the play’s memorable definition of
the psychological difference between women and men — poor, dopey, self-deceiving men:
"This is what we’re dealing with; we arrive with our baggage and for a while
they’re brilliant, they’re baggage handlers. We say, ‘Where’s
your baggage?’ They deny all knowledge of it. They’re in love, they
have none. Then just as you’re relaxing, a great big juggernaut arrives …
with their baggage. It got held up. The greatest myth men have about women is
that we overpack."
Both Rupert Graves (as Dan, the obituary writer, if you please) and Ciaran Hinds (the
dermatologist, Larry) are immensely accomplished actors. They couldn’t be
better in this manipulative game of chance and illusion that will leave them all losers.
The 22-year-old newcomer Anna Friel as the gamin stripper Alice is a particular
delight. Her accent is rooted in the north of England, where she was born —
suggesting the lower, no-nonsense, honestly vulgar orders. She’s fun and sexy
and vulnerable, a quicksilver talent playing an impulsive mystery. Ms. Friel is a
natural — a wonderful star actress in the making.
Mr. Marber makes Alice too much of a mystery, however. It’s a lapse of
sentimentality. There’s also some pretty blatant symbolism at work–the
shallowness of the chic photographic image; the spooky Victorian girl-waif encased behind
glass in a museum. Some of Mr. Marber’s moves are youthfully schematic.
"What do you have to do to get a bit of intimacy round here?" Larry howls in
despair. The answer is, Don’t go lap-dancing.
But such flaws aren’t decisive. In its cutting contemporary picture of
sexual desire and emotional failure, Closer is a brilliantly unusual virtual reality that
rings true. In its characters’ confusion and suffering, it yearns for gentle,
mundane, unearned things, such as happiness.
For all the sense of futility and loneliness, the play sparkles and disturbs us.
In London, audiences would laugh their heads off, perhaps recognizing themselves in the
convulsive scenes of laughably easy betrayal and romantic anarchy. Then they would
invariably fall uncomfortably silent before returning home, no doubt to have a blazing
argument with their loved ones about fidelity and the nature of true love.
It can get too close for comfort, which is, of course, Mr. Marber’s crafty game.
In its unsettling, perversely pleasurable way, Closer is the best new play on
Broadway.
This column ran on page 33 in the 4/5/99 edition of The New York Observer.
Closer
A Robert Fox, Scott Rudin, Roger Berlind, Carole Shorenstein Hays, ABC Inc. and the
Shubert Organization presentation of a play in two acts written and directed by Patrick
Marber.
Alice - Anna Friel Dan - Rupert Graves Larry - Ciaran Hinds Anna - Natasha Richardson
The increasing — and to some degree dismaying — infantilization of Broadway
finds a potent antidote in Patrick Marber’s "Closer," a brilliant and
bracingly adult new play from London (where else?) that lights a scorching fire under this
lukewarm theater season.
Directed with propulsive rhythm by the author himself, and acted by an incomparable
quartet of performers, "Closer" is both bruising and beautiful, shatteringly
funny and devastatingly sad. It feels ripped from the heart, an organ memorably
described here as looking like "a fist wrapped in blood," and it leaves a
lasting scar there.
Marber has joked that he didn’t realize until he’d finished the play that he
had written "Private Lives," and indeed in its prickly wit and essential
structure — two contemporary couples who switch partners more than once —
"Closer" recalls that Noel Coward classic. But it’s Coward laced with
a nihilistic chill that derives from Samuel Beckett.
Love’s inevitable fading is the tragic subject of the play, but it’s also a
symbol of the greater inevitability of death. Pleading for love, a character makes
the connection with the brutal bluntness that marks all the emotional exchanges in the
play: "I need you. I can’t think … I can’t breathe. We are
going to die."
Death and sex, those two great equalizers, are everywhere in "Closer."
Dan (Rupert Graves) is an obituary writer and aspiring novelist who meets the younger
Alice (Anna Friel) when she steps in front of a taxicab — willingly, it is implied,
although her wry mischievousness at the hospital, where he has escorted her, is plenty
lively.
The play then skips forward more than a year (its timeframe is millennial: life is the
blink of an eye). Alice and Dan are a couple, and Anna (Natasha Richardson), a
divorced and world-weary photographer, is snapping Dan for a book jacket. The sexual
attraction between them is instant, but Anna resists. "I’m not a
thief," she tells Alice, who arrives to pick up Dan and senses the dangerous
electricity in the room. The fourth character in the play is a dermatologist named
Larry (Ciaran Hinds). It was Larry who treated Alice’s injured leg at the
hospital, but he enters the play’s sexual equation only by cyberchance, when Dan,
posing as a woman named Anna in an Internet chat room (in one of the play’s crudest
and funniest scenes), suggests a meeting at which the real Anna happens to turn up.
Soon Anna and Larry are united, but in the searing final minutes of act one, the lives
of all four characters are turned inside out in a masterfully directed scene that brings
the subterranean ache of the play into wounding bloom. Dan coolly tells Alice that
he and Anna are in love, and the same information is prised out of a deeply hurting Anna
by Larry. From here unfolds an elegantly choreographed tale of love, jealousy, pain
and revenge that leaves all the characters wounded and one dead. Advance press has
hyped the play’s sometimes startling sexual frankness, but there’s nothing
coarse or showy about Marber’s use of explicit dialogue (only Alice’s sometime
profession as an upscale stripper feels gimmicky). When Larry humiliates Anna by
demanding to know the sexual details of her alliance with Dan, it’s the brutality of
the feeling, not the words themselves, that sears.
Indeed the play’s dialogue has a raw emotionality rarely heard in art or life.
It cuts like broken glass, rending flesh with every syllable, and is full of
bitter, intelligent, unvarnished truth. When Alice asks why Dan is leaving her
for Anna, he replies, "Because she doesn’t need me," and, later,
"Because I’m selfish and I think I’ll be happier with her."
Have the tortured dynamics of love and need ever been laid bare as honestly onstage
as they are here?
Marber’s cast is more than up to the task of bringing the needed nuances to this
extraordinarily artful play’s complexities (there is not an extraneous line in it,
and few are without coolly resonant meaning). Richardson’s casual radiance and
her slow-burning way with the play’s wryest passages — particularly a monologue
about men’s and women’s emotional baggage — round out the essential
goodness of her character. Graves’ shaggy good looks and puppy-dog eyes are
perfect for Dan, who is as deeply needy as he is careless of others’ needs.
Hinds, the only member of the cast from the original London production, has a Scottish
accent that defines his character as an outsider, and a heavy, brooding presence that
makes his emotional vulnerability all the more painful.
But it’s the delicate, exquisitely lovely Friel who is the discovery here.
Her Alice is both the nihilistic core of the play and its tender center, and the
paradoxical mixture of toughness and fragility that Friel brings to it are essential to
the play’s deepest truths. It’s a star-making performance.
The design team, too, provides stylistic details that amplify the play’s ideas.
Vicky Mortimer’s set, which recalls the work of artist Christian Boltanski, is
perfectly detailed, right down to the choice of houseplants for decorative effect:
cactuses only! Hugh Vanstone’s lighting has chilly dramatic flair and Paddy
Cunneen’s music adds haunting atmosphere.
Despite the stylishly seductive package and charismatic performances,
"Closer" is often hard to watch; its truths are painful, its honesty makes
you wince. In fact a telling irony of the play concerns the bitter fact that honesty
is as brutal as deception when it comes to matters of the heart. There is no easy
way out. "I don’t want to lie and I can’t tell the truth, so
it’s over," as one departing lover says — with utter despair — to
another.
It’s Dan’s desperate need to know the truth of Anna’s and Alice’s
feelings — both sexual and emotional — that drives the play to its dark
conclusion. But the quest is futile. The play’s sad message is that the
truth of the heart is ever-changing, and tainted by other equally liquid emotions:
jealousy, pride, selfishness, lust. Love’s a paltry, unreliable, painful thing,
Marber’s bleakly beautiful play tells us — how grim and how funny, then, that it
is all we have to ward off the terrors of life and death.
Opened March 25, 1999. Reviewed March 23. Running time: 2 HOURS, 10 MIN.
VarietyExtra!
Love Bites
JOHN SIMON
Patrick Marber's Closer is a sad, savvy, often funny play that casts a steely,
unblinking gaze at the world of relationships and lets you come to your own conclusions.
It is rather like that scar on young Alice's thigh: of a strange shape, clumsily
made, and for which she and others offer various explanations, none of which may be true.
But it is there, and something it betokens may never have healed.
There are four characters, sufficient for this wistful merry-go-round. Alice, who
has heedlessly walked in front of a taxi, has had her leg injured just below that old
scar. Dan, a young obituary writer, passing by, has brought her to the hospital.
While they wait for a doctor to show up, they banter and fall in love. A
middle-aged doctor, Larry, hurrying by, notices only because Alice is pretty, but, being a
dermatologist, can offer only skin-deep comfort. Which is how most comfort is.
Time passes rapidly in Closer. After a considerable lapse, we are in the studio
of the somewhat older Anna, a photographer taking pictures of Dan. It's for the book
jacket of his forthcoming novel, the story of himself and Alice, with whom he is now
living. Yet here he is instantly craving Anna, who, although seemingly aloof and
even mildly sarcastic, is not unresponsive. Alice, arriving to pick up Dan, rightly
suspects that there has been some hanky-panky.
The next scene takes place on the Internet, and is both visually and comedically highly
stimulating, but that is as much as I can tell you about it. From here on, as
several years go by, everyone ends up sexually and emotionally involved with everyone
else, each trying vainly to get closer to the other. Marber tells his story in
short, staccato scenes in which the unsaid talks as loudly as the said. The dialogue
is almost entirely stichomythic, the occasional speech still not much longer than a few
lines. There are frequent pauses, but not of the Pinteresque variety — more
like skipped heartbeats.
There are many ways of interpreting this play. Is it on the Anouilhesque theme of
how innocence and the rare ability to love never goes unpunished in this world? Is
it about how no relationship lasts, and how everyone ends up alone or with somebody else
in a worse kind of aloneness? Or is it about the noose of time tightening around
everyone's neck, closer and closer?
Or is this the Eliotian theme about our not being able to bear very much reality, and
that the truth ultimately kills? Early on, the obituarist Dan, asked by Alice,
"Do you like it . . . in a dying business?" answers, "It's a living."
And how is the loving business? Perpetually dying. But always only for
one partner; there is no shared Liebestod.
Closer, this acutely observed, wise play, is directed by its author the way he has
written it: with a scalpel. He has elicited a semi-abstract unit set from Vicki
Mortimer that is adaptable through minimal changes to both the specifics and the
ambiguities of each situation. Her costumes are similarly evocative, and Hugh
Vanstone's lighting artfully fills in the elliptic scenery. Paddy Cunneen's music is
brash and raw, like the emotions.
And the acting is just fine. Although Ciaran Hinds, as Larry, may be a bit
excessively unwinning, he conveys well the weaknesses of a strong man. Rupert Graves
gets the volatile, puppyish but nevertheless hurtful mischievousness of Dan perfectly, and
Natasha Richardson splendidly balances coolness and passion, irony and pain. As for
Alice: No one could capture the intermingled aggressiveness and vulnerability of youth
with more empathy than Anna Friel.
Closer does not merely hold your attention; it burrows into you. True, we have
three very fine American plays, rather unusually, currently on our boards (Wit, Side Man,
and This Is Our Youth), but why is it that good straight plays come so much more readily
from Britain? Is it tradition, education, culture, subsidies, more and cheaper
theater, or what? Someone should investigate.
From the April 5, 1999 issue of New York Magazine.
CLOSER OPENS ON WHITE WAY
NEW YORK (Variety)
Patrick Marber's hotly anticipated "Closer"' opened on Broadway Thursday
night, and searing performances from Natasha Richardson, Rupert Graves, Ciaran Hinds and
Anna Friel had the packed house at the Music Box on its feet for a solid five-minute
ovation at play's end. If they could see through the footlights, the four actors
must have been impressed at the faces looking up at them: Judi Dench, Harrison Ford, Uma
Thurman and Ethan Hawke, and Kate Moss.
Four Lovers and a Slide Show
By AMY GAMERMAN
"Because you don't love us or desire us or even like us, you think you've
won," the middle-aged man hisses at the stripper he's paying for a private table
dance. "It's not a war," the stripper retorts.
She's wrong: A war is raging in Patrick Marber's "Closer," and the
hand-to-hand combat would make Private Ryan flinch. Using words like bayonets, the
men and women in this play cut each other to ribbons — all in the name of love.
Not for nothing does one character describe the human heart as "a fist wrapped
in blood."
A London import, this coldly stylish, riveting new play at Broadway's Music Box Theatre
shreds any remnants of the stereotype of English reserve. Unlike David Hare's
"The Blue Room," which it somewhat resembles, the four characters in
"Closer" keep their clothes on. But there's nothing they won't say to one
another, in language that's rude and raw. If "The Blue Room" was a wistful
study of the loneliness of the short-distance lover, "Closer" is a virtual
catalog of the cruelties that people at this end of the millennium inflict upon one
another in the pursuit of happiness. It hurts to watch, but you can't look away.
As the play begins, one of the characters is already bleeding. Alice (Anna
Friel), the stripper, is sitting in a hospital waiting room with a horrible gash on her
leg. A cockney waif in a dress so skimpy it looks like a handkerchief, she's just
been hit by a cab carrying Dan (Rupert Graves), a journalist. It sounds as if she
did it on purpose: She looked into Dan's eyes, then stepped in front of his cab.
"I never look where I'm going," Alice says blithely, staring at Dan like he's
something she'd like to gobble up for lunch.
In the spiky world of "Closer," this counts as meeting cute. The scene
ends abruptly: Mr. Marber, who also directs, breaks up the action with sudden blackouts
that owe a lot to television. When the lights come up again, Alice and Dan are
living together, but he already has his eye on someone else: the alluring Anna (Natasha
Richardson), a photographer. Strutting the stage in a tight T-shirt and jeans, Anna
pours on a teasing sexuality that speaks louder than her claim that she doesn't kiss
strange men.
And then things start to get nasty. Dan poses as Anna — a porn-inspired,
big-breasted fantasy named Anna — in a cyber-sex encounter with Larry (Ciaran Hinds),
a middle-aged doctor. As the two men sit at desks at opposite corners of the stage,
their e-mail messages — obscenities couched in Web shorthand — appear on a giant
computer screen. "RU4 real?" a hot and bothered Larry finally asks.
"MEET ME," Dan replies, and sets up a rendezvous. Larry goes, and just by
chance, meets the real Anna. It tells you a bit about what Mr. Marber thinks of
romance that once the misunderstanding is cleared up ("You were filthy
yesterday," says a bewildered Larry), the two become lovers.
Over the course of the play these two couples will cheat on one another, swap partners
and swap back again in an intricate, careless choreography of lust and betrayal.
It's betrayal that Mr. Marber is really interested in. We don't see the moment when
Dan and Anna begin their affair: Instead, the playwright chooses to show us the damage it
inflicts, with a pair of break-up scenes staged simultaneously on side-by-side
sofas. A devastated Alice can't understand how Dan can leave her. "Because I'm
selfish and I think I'll be happier with her," he admits (Mr. Graves gets this
character's apologetic callowness just right). On the other side of the stage, an
enraged Larry — who's just confessed his own infidelity with a hooker — demands
that Anna recount every detail of her last romp with Dan, which just happens to have taken
place a few hours ago on the very sofa she's sitting on.
As one scene of domestic blight follows another, the props — Anna's camera, a huge
picture she's taken of Alice, Dan's desk, Anna and Larry's bed — are left to
accumulate below the looming stone walls that designer Vicki Mortimer has created as a
backdrop. By the final blackout, the stage is literally strewn with the litter these
selfish people leave in their wake. It's all just baggage, to use the word that Anna
uses in a drolly cynical monologue about men: "For a while they're brilliant, they're
baggage handlers," she says. "Then, just as you're relaxing, a great big
juggernaut arrives with their baggage."
Ms. Richardson gives a coolly competent performance -- maybe too cool. She
projects an airy remove from the sexual havoc taking place all around her that makes Anna
seem almost vacant at times. As her lovers, both Mr. Graves and Mr. Hinds are fine.
But the evening belongs to Ms. Friel, who is a revelation as Alice. She
captures all the contradictions of this armor-plated, wounded waif, whose sexiness is the
chocolate-coating over a neediness so deep, it's a little frightening. As the
betrayed Larry, Mr. Hinds rages and blusters, but Ms. Friel's Alice is the one who makes
you feel that romantic freedom comes at a price, and she's paying it. Her
performance gives this icy play the closest thing it has to a beating heart.
Wall Street Journal
Britain's Bella Donna
The motherland has exported a talented new actress.
It's Anna Friel, unstuffy glamour girl
BY GINIA BELLAFANTE
Perhaps what truly separates us from the British even now, in the era of Tony Blair's
fox-hunting-be-damned Cool Britannia, is the permeability of our show-business class.
While the British still seem to require that their actors study Marlowe at
Cambridge and enunciate their words in the manner of those listed in Burke's Peerage, we
live in a country where Tony Danza might--and does--turn up in The Iceman Cometh. By
the restrictive standards of her homeland, then, British actress Anna Friel, 22, currently
making her theatrical debut in the hit Broadway play Closer, has experienced a mesmerizing
turn of fortune. In just three years, with no classical training behind her, Friel,
the daughter of middle-class parents, has gone from starring as a murderous, sexually
abused lesbian in the British nighttime soap Brookside to being a serious and
sophisticated actress who is quickly gaining international celebrity.
Friel's role as Closer's Alice, a raw-nerved waif with an irreparably scarred heart,
has easily made her one of the most talked-about actresses in Manhattan. Among those
who've visited her backstage are Steven Spielberg and Mr. and Mrs. Tom Cruise, who brought
flowers ("to be that famous--and so nice," she remarks). Friel's stellar
reviews include one from the New Yorker where she was described as the
"powerhouse" of the play's cast and "a ravishing newcomer whose
authenticity makes it impossible to take your eyes off her." Next week Friel
will make her Hollywood debut in Michael Hoffman's movie version of Midsummer Night's
Dream. She'll also be turning up at Cannes, as a modern single mother in the British
comedy Mad Cows.
In possession of beauty at once sultry, pixie-ish and refined, Friel grew up in
northern England aspiring to capitalize on her skill for argument rather than her looks.
"I wanted to be a lawyer," she says. "I was on the debating
team; we'd re-create Parliament, and I won computers for our school." But a
life as Marcia Clark was not to be. During her middle-school years, Friel became
involved with a local theater group, performing in student-written plays. At 15, she
landed her first TV role, as Michael Palin's daughter in the British series GBH.
Film parts started to come soon after she was killed off in Brookside, and so too
did a starring part in an impressive BBC production of Dickens' Our Mutual Friend.
It is essentially Friel's lack of self-consequence that makes her so appealingly
distinct from other British actresses--and many American ones too. "Anna
doesn't have stage-school technique," notes her countryman Patrick Marber, writer and
director of Closer. "She's very natural and all from the heart."
Moreover, the actress seems to be leading as unglitzy a social life as a person can
have when good friends include Natasha Richardson, Ewan McGregor (with whom she stars in
the British film Rogue Trader, premiering in the U.S. on Cinemax next month) and Kate
Moss. She's single and dating now and then, even though she finds American men
somewhat inscrutable: "Men are wonderfully upfront here. But you go out, you
have a lovely time, you're asked a lot of questions, and you don't know if the guy's ever
going to call again." Following her nightly performances on Broadway, Friel often
goes to a divey neighborhood bar, where she has been learning to swing dance. We
suspect that she doesn't run into Dame Judi Dench or Kate Winslet there.
Time
