Taut Timing Gives Heartless ‘Closer’ a Soft Center

On stage, the unglamorously glamorous Natasha Richardson has a wonderful way of asking a question as if it were a statement, as if the question mark were extraneous and obvious. She does so in a way that reveals, warily, a bit of her character’s insides.

“How did you get so brutal?” wonders a stunned Anna, played by Richardson. The reply, from Alice (Anna Friel), her opponent in love and war: “I lived a little.”

Brutality is the spice of life, the natural product of jealous, aching hearts, in the world of Patrick Marber’s “Closer.” The play comes to Broadway after proving the toast of London’s West End, where it won the 1998 Olivier Award. (“The Weir,” another London import now on Broadway, took this year’s.)

It’s drum-tight and elegantly structured--but what’s inside the drum? Much of anything?

Thanks to author Marber’s own staging, featuring four exceptional performances proffering different brands of easy charisma, it’s possible to enjoy the play’s peppy heartlessness without really buying a word. “Closer” wants very much to be adult and clear-eyed and unromantic, but it ends up romanticizing everything in another way. Its sensibility is less adult than young adult. Marber can write, and well. But this play is all precision and strategy and snappy epigrammatic comebacks.

It begins on the first day of two lives together. Newspaper obituary writer Dan (Rupert Graves) has brought self-described “waif” Alice (Friel) to a hospital, following a minor traffic accident. A dermatologist, Larry (Ciaran Hinds), examines briefly Alice’s bruised leg, then leaves.

Dan and Alice become lovers, the latter serving as inspiration and subject of the former’s novel. Posing for his book-jacket cover photo, Dan meets photographer Anna and is smitten more or less instantly. Anna resists. Posing as Anna, Dan whiles away a dinner hour online in an Internet chat room. He engages Larry in some (fake) phone sex and agrees to meet Larry at a place Dan knows Anna will, in fact, be the next day.

Which brings Anna and Larry together, but Anna’s not done with Dan, and Larry--a steely borderline sociopath with a violent streak not buried quite as deeply as Dan’s--moves on to Alice. (This is a play that takes male English brutishness for granted.) Stripper Alice turns out to be not who she says she is. The recouplings unfold like “La Ronde,” with a fraction of the players.

Marber’s a deft chronicler of corroding friendships and has a musically attuned ear for staccato dialogue, as proven in his earlier play “Dealer’s Choice” (produced last year by the Mark Taper Forum). A heart-burned “Private Lives,” “Closer” achieves one rather difficult thing: It captures the sense and circumstances of smart people too obsessive, restless, jealous or hurting to live fully in the present.

The actors capture the same, beautifully. Richardson gives Anna a grave honesty and wry directness. Graves makes Dan appealing in his shambling eternal adolescence. Friel can’t quite make Alice something other than Marber made her--an abstracted sex toy with a past--but she’s excellent all the same. As is Hinds’ explosive Larry.

Marber’s direction is clean and slick, even with metaphors piling up on scenic designer Vicki Mortimer’s stage: Pieces of furniture and scenery are shoved upstage when the characters are done with a given scene, representations of everyone’s emotional baggage. That baggage, in fact, is the topic of one of Marber’s best speeches--and the only real moment in Act 2 when the serious and comic strains of “Closer” comfortably mingle.

There’s something limiting in Marber’s notion of sexual honesty, which here is expressly about sexual jealousy and possessiveness. The psychology of the female roles, especially, seems increasingly narrow. Marber’s gleefully unafraid of making Larry a controlling, Jacobean tragic-comic lout, but sending both women willingly back into his orbit is more a playwright’s convenience than a playwright’s insight.

Early on, obit writer Dan asks photographer Anna about his novel. Did she find it “obscene,” he asks. “No, I thought it was honest . . . about sex.” And then, correcting herself: “About love.” You can’t help but believe Marber’s writing his own review of “Closer” in that exchange. And you can’t help but believe, despite his talent and wit, that he’s easily impressed.

* “Closer,” Music Box Theatre, 239 W. 45th St., New York. Telecharge: (800) 432-7250.