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by Patrick Marber, directed by Dennis Garnhum

Canadian Stage Company, Berkeley Street Theatre Downstairs, Toronto

March 15-April 14, 2001

Larry: “I love everything about you that hurts”.

When England's Royal National Theatre chose 100 plays, each to represent a year of the 20th century when it was written, Patrick Marber's "Closer" was selected to represent 1997.  While its externals  are firmly rooted in the late 20th century, the themes of the play are universal.  It concerns four characters--Alice, Anna, Dan and Larry--strangers at the start, who are very direct with each other about their needs for sexual intimacy which they mistakenly equate with love.  By the end both men have slept with both women and all four have drifted apart again. 

The irony in the title is that the four desire to be closer to each other but back off from actually becoming close.  In Marber's dark satire of late 20th-century relationships, people have confused the interaction of physical surfaces with any interaction of mind or heart.  It is fitting that Marber has given all four professions that deal only in externals--Alice is a stripper, Anna a photographer, Dan an obituary writer and Larry a dermatologist.  The epitome of all the relationships in the play is an hilarious scene when the two men, Dan and Larry, meet in an internet chatroom, Dan pretending to be a woman.  Larry thinks he is achieving authentic responses from the "woman" online, when in fact, the Dan as the "woman" is merely telling Larry what he thinks Larry wants to hear and is testing him to see how far he'll go.  In this pseudo-relationship, both are completely isolated and without any true knowledge of the other. 

Marber's play itself is a marvellous study in contrasts between form and content.  Initially, the relations of the characters, based solely on sex, seem chaotic.  On reflection, one sees in the course of Marber's twelve powerful scenes, that the quartet moves through each of the four possible (heterosexual) combinations from their meeting, linking up, breaking up, rejoining and breaking up again.  Often parallels between couples are reinforced through intercut scenes using the same props.  The characters speak almost exclusively about sex, love and hate in language replete with four-letter words.  Yet the play itself chastely shows us no sex, violence or nudity.  Unlike so many playwrights, Marber is well aware that overuse of "shocking' language ultimately does not shock.  He exposes the characters' use of such "direct" language as in fact devalued and superficial.  The characters often say they want to tell or know the truth about each other, but they construe "truth" solely as negative and are never prepared to receive it.  Just as they have confused sex with love, they confuse freedom with lack of commitment with the result that they are more at sea than free.  They are selfish and seem actively to avoid knowing the self so that they waste their energy in trying maintain a successful pose.  Thus, paradoxically, a play about four aimless, morally ungrounded people turns out itself to be highly structured and firmly moral.

Normally, such an excess of "adult" language and situations would be a sign that the play is supposed to be grittily realistic.  But Marber's play is a satire and sends up the "adultness" of both.  If "Closer" were directed as realistic, it could be criticized for its characters who change the objects of their lust but who do not develop.  Fortunately, director Dennis Garnhum realizes this and plays up the outrageous wit and humour in the work from the start.  Gradually he allows the pain and anger of the characters to have a stronger impact, so that by the final scene the feelings of all the characters is muted, pervaded by a sense of loss and resignation.  The last scene takes place in Postman's Park, a Victorian monument dedicated to ordinary people who gave their lives to save others.  The selfless actions of the dedicatees mocks the hollowness of the characters' lives and reminds us of a nothingness to come.  Garnhum has the memorial plaques extend into the auditorium and across the back wall as if to show that we are in the same position as the characters.    

Garnhum has a superb cast to carry out his vision of the play.  All four are able to play the characters both as hilariously selfish and capable of a gradual awareness of their own emptiness.  Angela Vint succeeds at the difficult task of making the young Alice both innocent and sexually aware.  Her character is the centre of the play both because her arrival in London precipitates the action and because she is the one who has most clearly created a tough persona to protect her confused inner self.  The imagery of the play suggests that she is both Alice in a modern looking-glass world and Eve, who bites an apple to gain knowledge only to be barred from paradise.  Shaun Smyth plays Dan the obituary writer as a man whose desire for control stems from his own insecurity.  Dan saves Alice after an accident and falls in "love" with his image of her, only to exploit her life story for a novel and throw her over.  Gina Wilkinson is Anna the photographer who, like all the characters, needs a new relationship to create a sense of self-worth.  Wilkinson's delivery is a degree or two slower than the others, but she never fails to give her lines the right impact.  Just as Dan throws Alice over for Anna, she throws him over for Larry.  As played by Blair Williams, Larry the dermatologist is the most callous and witty of the four. Yet, Williams succeeds in making  Larry's grief at betrayal seem deeply felt, even if it is ultimately the grief of a child over losing a toy. 

Peter Hartwell's set mirrors the state of these lonely and drifting characters.  On a stage with the back and side walls bare save for memorial plaques, stand isolated parts of walls and office desks on floats that combine and recombine.  The sets and costumes are all off-white or grey so that symbolic objects stand out--an apple, a rose, Anna's shoes, Alice's dress at the club--all of them red.  Kevin Lamotte's lighting and Dave Howard's sound design instantly transport us from a hospital waiting room or busy art gallery to a strip club or airport hotel to the quiet closing scene in Postman's Park.  Special credit should go to the imaginative design for the projected internet conversation between Dan and Larry.

"Closer" is not a play I would recommend to the easily offended.  But anyone who can see past the continual "adult" language and explicit discussion of sex will find that this is one of the most intelligent and carefully wrought plays of the last decade.  Pascal saw man poised between two infinities.  Marber shows man poised between two nothingnesses--hollowness inside and death outside--attempting and failing ludicrously to negate both with "closeness".

©Christopher Hoile

Photo: Blair Williams. ©2012 Shaw Festival.