“Closer” at Age Twenty-Five

Patrick Marber’s play Closer, one of the masterpieces of our time and now twenty-five years of age, is back in London in an inventive and admirable new production at the Lyric Hammersmith. By the way, how should its title be pronounced? Generally it’s uttered with the S crisp, implying that the title means “more close.” (Close, closer, closest.) The play’s narrative, however, ends with news that one of the characters has died, which in turn suggests a more Z-like pronunciation of S. (To close; the closer; it’s closed.) The ambiguity is one of the incidental lures to revisit this intoxicating, moving, amazing play.

In the Financial Times after its premiere (National Theatre, May 1997), I wrote that throughout Closer Marber wrote “like a master.” Returning to it now, I remove the word “like”. Marber was and is a master of theatre: this is his classic. Here is a modern tragicomedy in which men and women speak wittily, excitingly, painfully of sexual love, the internet, infidelity, jealousy, and heartbreak. And they speak in brilliantly urban prose whose intense rhythms are closely related to the diction of the plays of Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard. When Closer was new, its openness about sex and about its connection to psychological complexity felt closely akin to the addictive BBC-TV series This Life (1996-1998); Marber’s writing had the same keen closeup quality as This Life’s camerawork. Perhaps now only those over forty remember This Life, but I testify it mattered to many of us.

Closer has only four characters. Most of its scenes consist only of duets. In much of the play, characters speak to each other in stichomythia: the tense alternation of one-liners that makes so striking an impression in ancient Greek drama, and which here often feels like long ralleys at Wimbledon. Alice, who describes herself as a waif, is also a lap-dancer. Dan, who meets her in the opening scene and whom she quickly chooses to love, is a journalist, writing obituaries. Larry is a medic who first meets them both in the course of that opening scene. Anna, a divorcée who meets Dan and then Alice in the second scene, is a professional photographer. None of them quite qualifies for the 1990s adjective “metrosexual”, and yet that word feels right for them: they’re all so sexually alive, so young-adult, and so urban.

The plot moves with shocking speed. Dan, now living with Alice, quickly falls for Anna. (Dan: “You’ve ruined my life.” Anna: “You’ll get over it.”) He then, however, plays a naughty, dirty, internet chat-room prank that, unexpectedly but successfully, brings Anna and Larry together as a couple. (They subsequently refer to Dan as Cupid.) Yet no sooner has Anna married Larry than she leaves him for Dan. Once Dan has broken Alice’s heart, she, independent again, turns lap-dancer. That’s what she’s doing when Larry discovers her, recognizes her, and seduces her. (Larry: “Alice, tell me something true.” Alice: “Lying is the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off. But it’s better if you do.”) He’s shattered by having lost Anna; this is, in part, revenge. And I’m not two-thirds way through the plot, important earlier threads of which I’ve also omitted.

As when Closer was new, Marber’s writing feels as classical as Racine. Despite the urban modernity of the way its characters speak, there’s an intense stylization at work in their repartee and their eloquence. One probable part of Marber’s inspiration was “1953”, Craig Raine’s imaginatively radical update of Racine’s Andromaque, which Marber had directed at the Almeida in 1996. A loves B, B loves C, C loves D. (“1953” is another masterpiece, though unjustly neglected.) But, whereas Andromaque and “1953” were intensely charged by tragic top-level power politics - Andromaque is set after the fall of Troy, its title character being one of the spoils; “1953” is set in a Great Britain that became a fascist state earlier in the twentieth century - the power-play in Closer is almost entirely focused on the psychosexual dimension. The characters here speak of oral sex, female and male orgasms, fetishism, which partner was on top in penetrative sex, lewd fantasies of orgies; but, though their frankness is itself a thrill, it's never merely sensationalistic. The sexuality expressed by these people expresses much more than sex itself.

As the story works its way, there are sequences when Alice, so impulsive, is as much an archetype of the femme fatale as Manon or Marguerite or Carmen or Lulu. The point of the femme fatale, as told in multiple novels and dramas (most of them written in French in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries), is her power to degrade the man. Sure enough, both Larry and Dan, in different scenes and different ways, reach points of utter degradation with Alice. And yet Marber’s characterisation of her leaves her with dignity, with mystery, and with pathos. At times, she’s the most touchingly vulnerable character in the play; but she also speaks with fabulous directness about love. You don’t fall in love, she explains; there’s always a moment when you choose whether or not to give your heart to this person. (This marvellous point deserves to be added to the anthologies of writing about love.)

Closer, amazingly, also shows us how she chooses to fall out of love. Like the Carmen of the opera, she says, “No, I don’t love you any more”, to Dan, twice. Again like Carmen, she defies him to strike her: “Go on, hit me.” When he does hit her, however, she - unlike Carmen - adds “Do you have a single original thought in your head?” And she sends him packing.

Sex, we see, can conceal as much as it reveals. In the still amazing chat-room scene, Dan pretends to be “Anna”. (“Anna,” typing: “What do U wank about? Larry, typing: “Ex-girlfriends. What do U wank about? “Anna”: “Strangers.”) How much is this prank an expression of Dan’s irresponsibility? How much is he using heterosexuality as a way of avoiding real intimacy? Why does he avert his eyes - so we’re told - before reaching orgasm? In one intensely painful breakup exchange, Anna tells Larry that sex with Dan wasn’t better than with him, but it was different - pause - gentler. When Larry insists on one final fuck with Anna as the condition for signing her divorce papers, he knows that Dan will find out and will be unable to avoid imagining them together. (“I didn’t do it to give her a nice time. I fucked her to fuck you up. A good fight is never clean. And yes of course she enjoyed it. She loves a guilty fuck.”) As for Alice, it turns out that she was never Alice. When she insists to Larry that she’s Jane, is she telling or hiding the truth?

All these psychosexual twists are both comic and tragic. Nothing is the same after any of them. Often we’re on the cusp of political incorrectness here, but I don’t think the woke will try cancelling Closer: badly though these men behave, these women prove stronger than their lovers.

Dan is surely the most immature of the four characters. Is he also the most unknowable? Certainly to himself. He breaks up his longterm relationship with Alice by starting an affair with Anna. He breaks up his longterm relationship with Anna by being unable to accept her one infidelity with Larry (even though Larry at the time remains her husband). And when he returns to Alice, he insists on her telling him the truth (“I’m addicted to it”) on one subject (her relationship with Dan): his insistence makes her fall out of love with him. She tells him what he does and doesn’t want to hear: “I don’t want to lie. It’s over. … Too late. I don’t love you any more. Bye. Here’s the truth, so now you can hate me. Larry fucked me all night. I enjoyed it. I came. I prefer you. Now go… I would have loved you forever. Please go.”

After Closer opened on Broadway (1999), it became a first-rate movie (2004), directed by Mike Nichols, with Julia Roberts as Anna, Jude Law as Dan, Clive Owen as Larry, and Natalie Portman as Alice. (One fun twist is that Owen was the play’s original Dan in 1997.) There are many reasons to watch and re-watch the film. Roberts was never better, especially in the use of her eyes; Law and Owen are very fine; and Portman, though surely miscast (no waif she), misses no layer of the drama. To have the women characters played as Americans by Americans subtly changes the drama, but interestingly.

The differences between the film and the play could serve as object-lessons about the respective genres. Closer the movie shows us outdoor scenes in London and New York; there are some view of St Paul’s Cathedral from the South Bank that so effortlessly capture the London of this century’s early years that they catch the heart (few of today’s nightmare skyscrapers hemming in St Paul’s).

But Nichols also gives us music, most of it very well chosen. (The overture to Rossini’s Cenerentola and the song “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You”, occur at just the right moments, to opposite effects.) The one musical score to which he keeps returning, however, is Mozart’s Così fan tutte. Since Così is an opera where two men wreak havoc on the hearts and lives of two women, we can assume Nichols means the parallelism deliberately. But although Mozart’s music is superlative, and though there are streaks of heartless game-playing in Marber’s play, the drama of Così is far more schematic and less convincing. (Mozart’s music is so potent that many will say the opposite, I know. But whereas Verdi applied great music in La Traviata to a story that remains about the degradation of its heroine, Mozart in Così applied great music to callow characters of both sexes who are all pawns in a game played by men.)

The parallels in Closer make quite a pile: Racine (Andromaque), Prévost (Manon Lescaut), Marivaux (La Dispute), Mozart and de Ponte (Così fan tutte), Dumas fils (La Dame aux camélias), Verdi (La Traviata), Mérimée (Carmen) and Bizet (Carmen), Wedekind (Lulu), Pinter (Betrayal), Stoppard (The Real Thing), Raine (“1953”). In an essay by Daniel Rosenthal in the Lyric Hammersmith programme, Marber himself (quoted in a 2005 interview) adds two more: “Closer can be looked at as Sexual Perversity in Chicago (Mamet) or sex, lies, and videotape (Soderbergh). They’re all the same play, really. Each successive generation needs to go: ‘No, no, this is where love is at the moment.” Does human nature change? Apparently it does. Love comes up differently in every case.

Since Closer was new, people have argued about it. Some viewers think it’s not real enough, not well characterized enough, and that Marber doesn’t understand love. Yet Alice, the character most looking for love at the outset, is, in her final scene, is as skeptical about it as W.H.Auden could be: she comes close to quoting Auden’s “So tell me the truth about love” as she dismisses Dan’s claims that he loves her. Closer isn’t an encyclopaedia of love; but its examination of many contrasting facets of love proceeds like one bombshell after another. By the end, we’re left in mystery about what does and doesn’t constitute love; and we’re left in mystery about human identity. As we find that these four characters, once so vitally important to one another, have all now gone separate ways, what we feel is a great sense of loss.

The Lyric Hammersmith production, directed by Clare Lizzimore, is a perfect example of an idiom that I expected to loathe but found myself immediately won over by. Closer here is acted out in the space before a live music event, with a chorus of four silent actors whose actions echo or amplify what’s going on. Alice (Ella Hunt) sings to the music during scene-changes: this adds one more layer to her femme fatale persona, and makes her one of the most active agents in the drama. But the music never plays while characters are speaking. The pauses and silences between the character’s lines registers powerfully. Marber’s rhythm still feels electric.  

Watching and listening, I never thought of this idiom as Brechtian, but I’m wrong. Very shrewdly, Lizzimore says in Rosenthal’s essay “I wanted it <Closer> to be rendered exactly as written, but also protect it from being judged through our mind-set in a pejorative way. I immediately thought of Brecht, and how creating a distance between the production and the play allows for politics.”

That’s an exceptionally generous approach from a young director. (Lizzimore first encountered Closer in 2007.) And the effect isn’t really one of distance or alienation: on press night (Wednesday 20 July), young people were audibly gripped by Marber’s hilarious, horrifying, and moving play. This old person was, too. Jack Farthing is Dan; Nina Toussaint-White is Anna; Sam Troughton is Larry. They and Hunt’s Alice kept making me change my mind about each character from scene to scene. As for parallels, Lizzimore’s silent chorus make us feel how often other couples are going through the same or something close. They’re unobtrusive, softly and warmly lit, but now and then they too catch the heart.

Even Hunt’s beauty seems to change: as the story develops, her face became more and more haunting. We’re most aware of acting with Troughton’s Larry, and yet that’s welcome: his Larry has such driving energy and enthusiasm (of which he’s aware even as he turns it on) that he’s all the more endearingly vulnerable when he becomes disconcerted on finding he’s being played. Toussaint-White is the most youthful Anna I’ve seen, but the play makes no great issue of age or age type. She has a couple of moments when she indicates discomfiture too obviously, but we never doubt the emotional bewilderment and pain she feels are real. Farthing, whose hair is sometimes tied back, sometimes loose, has all Dan’s neediness and impetuosity: I’d have said he becomes the character about whom we change our minds most were it not for Ella Hunt. Is she a waif looking for love, finding it, and broken by betrayal? Is she a siren whose self-impelled course wreaks havoc on others? Both and then more. You hang on Closer; it lives in the line. Who these people are – to one another and to us – changes in every beat.

@Alastair Macaulay 2022

1: My “Financial Times” review of the 1997 premiere of Patrick Marber’s “Closer”

2: The text of that 1997 review. Yes, my name was misprinted.

3: My 1998 “Financial Times” review of the West End transfer of the original production of “Closer”.

4: Julia Roberts (Anna) and Clive Owen (Larry) in Mike Nichols’s 2004 film of “Closer”.

5: Nina Toussaint-White (Anna) and Jack Farthing (Dan) in the 2022 Lyric Hammersmith production of “Closer”. Photograph: Marc Brenner.

6: Ella Hunt as Alice before the photograph of her at Anna’s exhibition in the 2022 Lyric Hammersmith production of “Closer”.