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Closer
As the lights went down on the intimate Aphra stage and the four actors were positioned in waiting, there was an anticipation and excitement in the air. This was Patrick Marber’s Closer, a story of deceit, love, lies and intense sexual politics for which the audience, I am certain, was not prepared.
The story revolves around four protagonists: Alice, Larry, Anna and Dan, who meet through a series of coincidences and proceed to sleep with one another. And then one again. And then another. Again. Indeed, the intertwining love affairs between the characters are bewildering and brutal, but in director Nina Spijker’s debut ,the brutality and unveiled sadism are increased tenfold. The dialogue, on which the play rests, was so fast-paced and, at points, unflinchingly obscene, that it left moments of silence sounding louder than ever. The raw sexuality of the play oozed from the characters and stripped them down to their bare psychology, as well as their underwear.
The interplay of the psychological battles between the characters was so clever and so clear that the spectator could virtually see the subtext of each line, each thrust, each parry. This was particularly true of the confrontation between Jon Cottrel’s sardonic and witty Larry, and James Hartman’s amiable and sarcastic Dan, which quickly turned attacker into defender through the swift exchange of devastating truths. What made this, and many other scenes, so hard and yet desirable to watch was the paradoxical portrayal of the characters; brutal but subtle, impregnable but vulnerable. This must be attributed, at least in part, to the vast rehearsal period of the troupe that ranged several months. The result was four people who were human, real and all painfully believable.
Perhaps one of the most poignant sequences of the play comes at the close of the first act. Dan joins Farah Abdullah’s quirky, deceitful Alice on one half of the stage and Anna, played cold and corruptible by Lucie Sherwood is joined by Larry on the other as the two couples simultaneously break up. The maintained equilibrium on the stage throughout the scene was remarkable, as was the splicing together of the two scenes into one; as one couple are furious, the other are passive and defeated, as Anna wrenchingly breaks Larry’s heart, Alice begs Dan not to leave. Spijker’s timing and staging of the scene is beautiful. Each character’s abrupt and all too-real change of emotion and status is crushing. All in all, this scene, through cast and director, is characteristic of the play’s unrelenting brutality, epitomising Marber’s original portrayal of battling sexes and, perhaps more importantly, lost, delicate people.