A Play Against Type

In Patrick Marber’s excoriating drama “Closer,” one of the four characters, a doctor, describes the heart as “a fist wrapped in blood.” It is a chilling image that perfectly captures the dark, cynical portrait of love of this icy contemporary British play about two couples who exchange partners in a dance of lust, desire, need and betrayal.

Later in the play, Larry, the doctor, clenches his fist menacingly over his lover Anna, as she unflinchingly--and very graphically--tells him how she has betrayed him sexually.

Natasha Richardson, who plays Anna in the production of “Closer” that just opened on Broadway, is wondering what a nice girl like her is doing in a nasty play like this.

“I told Patrick Marber, ‘You write these cold and tough characters, why did you cast a marshmallow like me to play one of them? I won’t fit in,’ ” says the 35-year-old actress during a conversation in her dressing room at the Music Box Theatre last week. “And he said, ‘I wanted softies to play toughies.’ And that’s been the struggle. To be as brutal and tough as the play requires, but keep the heart beating underneath.”

As Anna, who is a photographer, Richardson has managed brilliantly to do just that according to the reviews, to bring her luminous beauty and emotional depth back to Broadway in a new light, just one year after winning a Tony for her scarred and pathetic portrait of Sally Bowles in the current revival of “Cabaret.”

Surprisingly, Richardson has brought comic timing to the role of Anna as well, mining most of the laughs in the play with her wryly ironic takes on the perennial battle of the sexes. She has a particularly memorable aria about the myth that women have all the emotional baggage and men none. Says Anna, “Then . . . just as you’re relaxing . . . a Great Big Juggernaut arrives . . . with their baggage. It Got Held Up. One of the greatest myths men have about women is that we over-pack.”

“She’s very droll,” says Marber, who not only wrote the Olivier Award-winning play, but also directs this production. He cast her along with Ciaran Hinds (Larry) and Rupert Graves (playing a selfish young novelist) and newcomer Anna Friel (the novelist’s vulnerable, waif-like lover). “[Richardson has] found a good way of underplaying the comedy and getting the laughs. But she’s also drawn to the dangerous edge of things. ‘Patty Hearst’ and ‘The Comfort of Strangers.’ That’s pretty rough stuff.”

“To be honest, I think it’s cathartic to explore the pain I’ve had in my life through my work,” Richardson says of her willingness to take on difficult roles, which have included Catherine in “Suddenly Last Summer” and the title role of “Zelda,” both of which she did for American television. Nonetheless, the actress had no intention of returning to the stage quite so soon, especially to go from one emotionally bruising role to another. That’s why her comic turn last year as the mother in Disney’s “The Parent Trap” came as such a welcome relief. But it was during a break in filming “Parent Trap” in London that Richardson saw “Closer” at the Royal National Theatre, before its transfer to the West End. The play made the hair on the back of her neck stand up.

“I thought, ‘What a disturbing, raw, funny play about our lives,’ and what a kick to do something contemporary. Certainly in my theater work I’ve been firmly placed in the past,” she says, referring to her 1993 Tony-nominated Broadway debut in a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s “Anna Christie” and her West End appearances in “The Seagull” and “High Society.”

“It’s a play that people react to--for good or bad. My friend Ron Rifkin [who co-starred in “Cabaret”] said to me, ‘After the first act, I wasn’t sure I liked any of these people. At the end, I realized, I am all of these people.’ Some people just hate it, get very angry over it, but I like that. It’s the reason for doing theater for me, not just to do some ‘worthy’ play for the sake of it.”

Richardson says that embracing the bleak nihilism of the play was not as difficult as the challenge of playing such a strong, confident woman as Anna. “It’s weird, because people who don’t know me very well think of me as a very sort of competent, cool woman,” she says, “because that’s my armor, my protective shield. But I’m drawn to the more vulnerable places in one’s soul. The witty repartee, the competence of Anna in ‘Closer,’ I don’t naturally gravitate there, strangely enough. She’s much more grown-up, a Woman, and I like to play the Girl.”

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Indeed, wearing a form-fitting pink top, tan pants and smoking heavily, Richardson appears both girlish and very sexy, framed by bouquets of roses, lilies and orchids sent by well-wishers and admirers. She’s intelligent, to be sure, and an earnest link to her fabulous acting pedigree--granddaughter of Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson, daughter of Vanessa Redgrave and the late director Tony Richardson. She has her mother’s spiritual ballast, but she’s also eager to rock with laughter. A mordant sense of humor frequently pierces a conversation dominated by how her own emotional history resonates with the role she’s currently playing.

Richardson says that there are “some uncannily similar moments” in “Closer” to those she’s experienced with men in her own life. In one of those twists of fate, one of the producers of the New York production of “Closer” is her ex-husband, Robert Fox, the noted West End impresario. She was married to him when she fell in love with actor Liam Neeson while they were appearing together on Broadway in “Anna Christie.”

Her divorce from Fox, and subsequent marriage to Neeson--with whom she now lives in New York with their two young children, Michael and Daniel--evidently left no hard feelings. Fox produced Neeson’s star turn on Broadway last season in “Judas Kiss.” But Richardson says that it was embarrassing and awkward at first to play Anna in “Closer” with her ex-husband in the audience. “He came to a run-through and at one point I thought to myself, ‘I don’t think I can do this in front of him.’ It was so raw, so lacerating.”

While Richardson says she is in harmony with Anna in “Closer” to an almost “scary” degree, they are on opposite sides when it comes to one of the central dilemmas facing the play’s characters: How much truth can a relationship take? As Dan says to a brutally honest Anna, “What’s so great about the truth? Try lying for a change--it’s the currency of the world.” Anna is willing to sacrifice relationships on the firm belief that honesty matters above all else. Richardson disagrees.

“I’m firmly in the camp that says it’s much, much better to lie,” she says. “I couldn’t bear to say some of the hurtful things Anna says. It’s the whole Clinton-Lewinsky moral dilemma. I think he did the absolutely right thing in not telling the truth. I think it’s the only decent thing to do.”

Is one therefore to assume that if, say, her husband were having an affair, she’d rather not know about it?

“Weeeeeell,” Richardson trills, breaking out into her distinctively staccato bark of a laugh. “Well, of course, I’d be desperate to know. Are you kidding? But that might not be the right choice. In my past life, I’ve lied to protect someone’s feelings.”

Some of the pain, hurt and anger Richardson invests in Anna stems from the actress’ fervid belief in the grand passion of love--even if her “desperate, hopeless romanticism,” as she terms it, has had its share of reality checks all along the way. Her first cold shock of betrayal, she says, came early, at age 10, when she discovered that she and her sister Joely took second place to their mother’s political activism.

“I understand it from a different perspective now,” she says evenly. “I believe that my mother deeply felt that it was the only way to ensure a future for her children--so she jettisoned today for tomorrow. She has changed so much. She’s now the most gloriously generous and sensitive mother and woman. But it was a very painful realization at the time. Every child wants to think--needs to know--that they are the most important things in their parents’ lives.”

Richardson adds that she has applied the lesson to her own children’s needs. “And it certainly has put me off politics!” she says and laughs.

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Richardson and her mother are very close, and Redgrave has given her daughter some insightful acting tips. For example, one of the most erotically charged scenes in “Closer” is when Anna is photographing novelist Dan for the fly cover of his book. In a tango of control within the studio, she at one point reaches over and musses his hair. “That scene sort of evolved,” Richardson says. “I was just messing with the buttons on his shirt and my mum came to a preview and she said afterward, ‘I think you have to mess with him a bit more.’ So I got my hands in his hair. It was very good advice.”

Richardson’s romantic crushes during her teen years, fostered by books like “Wuthering Heights,” foundered on her self-image as “a rather unattractive, overweight” girl with bad skin and a social life on the margins, she says. “I was always falling in love with some beautiful, ‘older’ man, all of 20, who rejected me,” she recalls. “That has definitely stayed with me all my life, the fact that I was not attractive when most people are at their peak. That happened to me later. Dammit! Because, no matter how you change outwardly, you remain that ungainly 16-year-old longing to be glamorous and sexy and grown-up.”

She admits that time and experience have tempered her romanticism, though she takes exception to a review of the Roberto Benigni film “Life Is Beautiful” in the New Yorker, in which critic David Denby argues that the notion that love could conquer something as devastating as the Holocaust is misguided at best.

“I was profoundly shocked by that review, mystified by that take,” she says. “You can quibble with whatever in that film, but his point that love cannot save you is anathema to me. What else could possibly sustain you through the darkest moments in life? I can’t have that cynical of a view.”

Although she still believes in “true love,” Richardson isn’t so sure anymore whether it is possible to completely fuse with another person--morally, spiritually, physically--the kind of consummation the characters in “Closer” nearly destroy themselves trying to achieve. Indeed, at the end of the play, one is dead, two are emotionally lost and only Anna survives the scarring. The dream of an all-encompassing love seems elusive to Richardson, the victim of the compromises that are necessary to make any relationship work.

“Particularly in the world we live in, where [relationships] are so disposable,” she says. “Well, that didn’t work out, and that’s OK, because someone better will come along. And someone better rarely comes along because we all bring our baggage with us. Different people, similar sets of problems.”

Richardson believes accommodating those compromises may be particularly hard for women, most of whom can’t resist battering against the walls of emotional male reserve for deeper contact. She’s reconciled herself to the fact that there may be parts of Neeson she may never know or understand. “I’ve had to accept it because I’m married to a real guy, G-U-Y,” she says. “I’m still learning because, like most women, I love to have a good talk, a good cry and that’s how we heal ourselves. I’d crack up if I couldn’t.” Richardson thinks for a moment then laughs. “I mean I crack up on a regular basis, anyway, but I’d really crack up if I couldn’t talk with my close girlfriends and a few close male friends. And it’s totally foreign to us that some men think it’s not necessarily the way to feel better.” Taking a puff on her cigarette, she adds, “I think it affects your health. I mean smoking’s not good, but keeping your emotions and feelings bottled up is just about as bad for your health as you can get.”

Richardson adds puckishly, “It may be much easier to be gay. Maybe it isn’t, but at least you’d understand the species you’re dealing with.”

It doesn’t seem likely, however, that Richardson will soon abdicate her role in illuminating the foibles, follies and furies bedeviling sexual love. She’s quite eager to assay other passionately romantic roles in both classic and contemporary drama. Of the former, her wish list includes Maggie in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” Shakespeare’s Cleopatra and Ibsen’s “Lady From the Sea.” Maybe even Blanche DuBois of “Streetcar Named Desire” much later down the road.

On the modern front, she is actively developing, with film producer Mace Neufeld, an adaptation of “Asylum,” a dark, brooding erotic thriller that Marber is adapting from the novel of the same name by Patrick McGrath. In it, she will play a romantic woman who has an affair with an inmate--played by Neeson--in an asylum where her husband, a psychiatrist, is the head. Unsatisfied with her film career thus far, Richardson hopes the project will draw upon the full strength of her acting ability in the way theater has done.

“She goes a bit mad, there’s betrayal, and it’s very intense,” she says. “It’s very different from ‘Closer,’ but what they share is a sexuality and a lack of fear in going into darker places. Oh God. . . .”

Richardson sighs and rolls her eyes, conscious that she’s back dancing on the dangerous edges of human experience.

Brightening, she says. “You know, for having written such a vicious piece in many ways, Patrick Marber is a really good guy, a man of great integrity. In a very modern way, he’s holding ‘a mirror up to nature,’ to quote Shakespeare. Someone described the play, rather oddly I thought at the time, as ‘puritanical.’ And I suppose it is in the sense that people behave very badly to each other but they don’t get rewarded or redeemed for it. Anna is the one who has really learned something--not to make the selfish choice of just going with what you feel. ‘I’m in love, that excuses anything.’ ”

Perhaps the point of going to the very reaches of the human experience, adds Richardson, “is to come out, cleansed, on the other side.”*

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