Media Review - Closer Review - Culture Wars

Culture Wars reviewed our November 2004 production at the Putney Arts Theatre.

Dan is a newspaper obituary writer, who prepares tributes for those expected to die imminently. For some, however, he notes, 'there just isn't enough space'. Which is rather the case with the human heart, Patrick Marber suggests in Closer.

We write each other in and out of our lives, and sometimes there just isn't enough space in our hearts for those we once planned to occupy them. So it is with Dan and Alice, Larry and Anna, who swap partners, allowing one love to be pushed out of their hearts as they embrace the new, then repeating the process as they return to their former lovers: oblivious, or deliberatly blind to the pain they cause each other.

Marber's play might seem an indictment of a self-orientated society, capable only of the most superficial relationships, but in fact if anything it is a homage to the strength of the human heart. Larry, a dermatologist, who is treated by the other characters in the play as genial but no great thinker, delivers the single most important image of the play, describing the heart as 'a fist wrapped in blood'. With these words, Marber captures the power of the heart - as a metaphor for our capacity for love as well as in its literal, physical sense - loaded as it is with as much potential for destruction as for giving life. No matter how badly we or others allow it to be damaged, it pulses on regardless, making us simultaneously the most loving, generous of people, and the most selfishly callous.

True, in Closer we see mostly the self-centred behaviour of the four main characters. When Dan is initially rebuffed by Anna, it is all he can do to stop himself stamping his foot like a child who is forbidden the toy he wants, and he behaves in a similar fashion when she returns to her husband after their affair. Yet with the fickleness of a child he immediately returns to craving Alice, his former lover whom he cruelly cheated on and left for Anna.

In Dan, Antony Law is given the trickiest part to deal with, and he frequently comes across as little more than a spineless, self-pitying creep. The second half of the play, however, finds him, and indeed the rest of the cast, giving greater nuance to their characters. The two women, initially required to do little other than play up to their physical images - Catherine Allison's Alice, a posturing little minx, and Michelle Frances' Anna, with her tragic, world-weary face marked to inflict pain unintentionally and to endure pain in return - thankfully rise above this in the latter stages of the play to deliver quietly devastating performances.

Quite what Marber is implying by having one of his female characters end up dead and the other sharing her life with a dog, while Larry ends up with a nurse and Dan ends the play as he has spent the majority of it, feeling sorry for himself, is uncertain. That women are the ones who get damaged in the fallout of relationships? Or that they're better off dead or cuddling a dog than being with men? Either way, it seems a rather glib conclusion to a script that otherwise strives to be honest and unpatronising.

In a production of highly persuasive, if occasionally inconsistent performances, it is Garth Wright as Larry who provides the unassuming tour de force of the production. He delivers a brilliantly comic turn in a scene where he accesses what he believes to be an internet porn chatroom, brusquely dismissing an enquiry about a patient so he can ask the woman in the chatroom to 'define epic' after she describes herself as having 'epic tits'. And he is equally credible when expressing the bitter hurt of discovering his wife's infidelity, asking her whether she ever loved him then retaliating to her affirmative response with the line - 'Big fucking deal', spat out with the ferocity only a broken heart can muster. Wright infuses the character of Larry with the humanity - in all its ugliness as much as its beauty - that Marber's script is crying out for.

His is the standout performance in what is, under Tony de Vizio's direction, an extremely successful production. In the initial scenes they struggle to find it, but once they locate the pulse of the play in the second half, the Chelsea Players' version of Closer thumps with an intoxicating vitality.

- Hannah Knowles, Culture Wars

original review source