Intimate, Brutal Betrayals

Patrick Marber’s “Closer” cuts very close to the bone. The play’s characters--four young Londoners--deal with sexual betrayal and jealousy in language so direct and contemporary that many of the younger couples in the audience at the Lyric Theatre gasped out loud at hearing their own most desperate arguments played back to them in so public a forum. “Closer” rakes through the muck of intimacy and shows us ourselves at the edge of a cliff, peering into the abyss where love and trust turn into cruelty and white-hot fear.

Such clarity can be extremely energizing, and “Closer” is a great jolt of aesthetic caffeine. The play will surprise anyone who knows Marber only from his first play, “Dealer’s Choice,” seen at the Mark Taper Forum earlier this year. While “Dealer’s Choice,” about men and gambling, was well observed and funny, “Closer” is hypnotically, savagely frank and funnier still. Instead of the all-male milieu of “Dealer’s Choice,” “Closer” features two men and two women, all of them equally well-written. In fact, the women talk about men and the way they fall in love in an exchange that is so pithy, brilliant and hilariously ungenerous that it’s hard to believe it was written by a man.

Dan (Lloyd Owen), a newspaper obituary writer with a seductively soft-spoken air, meets the waifish stripper Alice (Kate Ashfield) when she gets hit by a cab. The lovers in this play are always getting hit by cabs, metaphorically speaking. Marber is interested in all the nasty surprises in store for people who love and make vows but who continue to search for that elusive something else. And he suggests that this is a much more common state than any of us care to admit.

That assumption is partly what makes “Closer” so alive. Dan and Alice fall in love. Then, one day, when Dan is having his picture taken for the jacket of a novel he has written, he falls in love with Anna (Imogen Stubbs), the elegant photographer. “Is it because she’s clever?” asks Alice, destroyed. “No, it’s because she doesn’t need me,” Dan answers.

Honesty is never so brutal as at moments like these. Marber’s interest is in the way men and women create a web of comfort and tenderness and how that web can be destroyed, sometimes in just a sentence. “This will hurt,” Dan says to Alice as a warning shot. “I’ve been with Anna.” Marber also focuses on the toughness that can emerge fully formed when needed, when it’s time to break free of that web.

“Ever seen a human heart?” asks Larry (Tom Mannion), a pornography-loving dermatologist who marries Anna and who is cuckolded by Dan. “It looks like a fist wrapped in blood.”

In “Closer,” all four characters not only hear things they never want to hear, they actively seek out the most painful knowledge available. Once Larry learns that Anna’s been sleeping with Dan secretly for a year, he becomes like a man picking a scab. He needs to know every detail of their last sexual encounter, which, in a kind of naturally occurring terrible irony, occurred on the very chaise on which Anna is now sitting.

Marber has directed his own play with a mesmerizing intensity. Like Pinter and Stoppard, to whom he has been compared, every pause, every inflection, counts.

The current excellent cast is not the original one; the play first opened at the Royal National Theatre’s smallest stage in May 1997, then went on to a larger stage at the National and now is in the West End. It won the 1998 Olivier Award for best new play, and is scheduled to arrive on Broadway this fall.

As for movie rights, the British press has reported some courting of the playwright by Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman; one night last week Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger attended the play. “Closer” is sure to make its mark on the U.S.; it’s the kind of play that simply has to get around.

“Closer” utilizes what’s current without ever trivializing. One scene has Dan and Larry meeting on the Internet, with Dan pretending to be a woman in a raunchy sex discussion. The words they type are projected behind them on a huge screen, while we watch their expressions, full of mischief and lust. The play is very much about what we reveal and what we keep secret. Alice, embodied by Ashfield as a solemn beauty in hiking boots, is the only character who seems capable of loving honestly and faithfully. But this doesn’t exempt her from danger. Nor does it mean that she is a particularly honest person in other regards, or even that she is who she says she is.

“Closer” is an exhilarating play, stitched together by the sadness of loss. It suggests that danger lurks everywhere, where we expect it to be and, also, closer.

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* “Closer,” Lyric Theatre, Shaftsbury Avenue, London, 011-441-71-334-4444 or 011-441-71-494-5045. Runs indefinitely.