Music Box Theatre (Seating Chart) 1535 Broadway Author and Director: Patrick Marber Cast: Natasha Richardson, Ciaran Hinds (both pictured left), Rupert Graves, Anna Friel

"Love is a fire, a heaven, a hell where pleasure, pain and sad repentance dwell." Or words to that effect. I don't remember who wrote that -- the important thing, I suppose, is that it was written -- but it was certainly recalled as I was watching Patrick Marber's Closer, a darkly comic, brutally lacerating dissection of the ever-widening chasm between men and women.

The play opens as it ends -- with a woman alone onstage. This particular woman is named Alice Eyres (Anna Friel). Hers is the face which will haunt the entire production. She is a waif with a bloody gash on her leg, courtesy of a run-in with a car. (Run-ins with vehicles seem to be a common occurence for Alice.) She has been brought to the hospital by Dan (Rupert Graves), a randy sort who cuts the crusts off his sandwiches and is an obituarist. "It's a living," he deadpans. Despite his attachment to a girl named Ruth, Dan begins the mating dance with Anna. Soon their flirtation turns to talk of men and women. A stripper, Alice purports to giving men what they want: "They want a girl who looks like a boy. [She] must come like a train. . .but with elegance." "What do you want?" Dan counters. "To be loved," Alice replies. "That simple?" "It's a big want."

Time passes -- Dan and Alice have hooked up, he's finished the novel he's been working on and he's currently sitting for a portrait session with a photographer named Anna (Natasha Richardson). After some verbal badinage, they share a kiss but Dan loses her to Larry (Ciaran Hinds), a dermatologist whom Dan plays a trick on during a chat on the Internet. "You give us imagery," Larry says to Alice at a later point. "And we do with it what we will." It's certainly true of the play's wittiest scene: Dan and Larry sit on opposite sides of the stage, facing their laptops while a large blue screen projects their typed exchange. Dan pretends to be Anna, "a cum hungry bitch with epic tits," and Larry runs far and fast with that illusion. Dan suggests they meet, Larry agrees and encounters the real Anna.

The last scene of the First Act sets out to destroy both couplings. Both couples frame either side of the stage. Dan admits to loving Anna and wanting to be with her. The hurt Alice rails then retreats, asking Dan if she can still see him, then storms out of his life. The real wallop, however, is in the scene shared by Larry and Anna. Now married, Larry confesses to a dalliance during a dermatological conference in New York. He realizes, though, that Anna is about to leave him for another reason. When she admits of her ongoing affair with Dan, he lets loose and asks for details. He interrogates and interrogates, digging for dirtier details until she finally succumbs to his questioning -- "What did he taste like?" "Like you, but sweeter!" A wincing jab, yes, but Larry delivers the final blow: "Thank you for your honesty. Now fuck off and die, you fucked-up slag!" Curtain down. Intermission. Whew!

Act Two is no less barbarous -- the big want called love is continually handled by reckless hearts and thus continually lost -- but at least there's a bit of ruefulness that tenderizes the wounds. Marber's quadrangle of self-destructive lovers defiled by their past romantic failures have finally played out all the variances of their equations. Marber has a precise way of coating words most venomously but also of revealing the truth beneath the venom. And a comic sting. Anna's observation on men, for instance, provides all these traits: "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."

Vicki Mortimer's set design begins with brick walls and a backdrop which resembles medical files but are graves, a constant reminder that we are all bound to be statistics. The stage, by play's end, is cluttered with the furniture from previous scenes -- the characters' collective flotsam. I hear and read the play's New York incarnation is less visceral because the Music Box, with its large proscenium, provides less intimacy than the play's original London home, Royal National's Cottleshoe Theatre. Perhaps the Cottleshoe's proximity would have afforded the audience to be hit by more of the characters' slings and arrows but, believe me, the words still bite, wherever the location.

Graves is mischievously caddish as young Dan. Hinds makes Larry, really a despicable sort who does have genuine care, all too human. Friel delivers a knockout performance. You can't keep your eyes off her -- which is why I didn't fully appreciate Richardson's portrayal at my initial viewing of the play. I saw the play several days later -- and I have no doubt that I will revisit this play several more times during its run -- and paid closer attention to her.

I knew she could put her sangfroid spin on Marber's lines with such elan. What I didn't know is the depths of vulnerability she could plumb. During Larry's verbal assault at the end of Act I, your sympathies immediately go to Anna. Yes, she's made her own bed and now she must lie in it, but to be confronted with the consequences of your decisions is never an easy thing -- if you are human, you will feel sorry for her. Yet Richardson doesn't coast on this presupposition -- she trembles, she aches, she boils, she nurtures, and is defeated. It is the image of Richardson that ends Closer. Alone and yet none the wiser.

Copyright ©1999 Pamela's Film and Entertainment Site

This page hosted by Get your own Free Home Page