This year marks the 25th anniversary of the opening of Patrick Marber’s Closer and reveals the play to be as good as new – with all its cruelty, humour and desire intact. Men, in Marber’s world, are from some twisted version of Venus, while women are from planet Earth and more emotionally evolved than their lust-crazed male counterparts. It’s a dark, undeceived or cynical piece (depending on your point of view) that recalls Pinter’s Betrayal or an English version of Schnitzler’s La Ronde – except that it is more vicious oblong than circle and without the reference to class. A piece about a quartet of tormenting and tormented lovers, the only way in which the 1997 play – also a 2005 film – shows its age is in the atmosphere of its internet chat room scene, which seemed novel in the original.
The new production is directed by Clare Lizzimore with style, and Soutra Gilmour’s spare red-and-black set is designed with musicians in mind, as if an intense gig were about to get under way, which, in a sense, it is. Arun Ghosh (musical director and arrangement) and Radhika Aggarwal play insinuatingly: their music is the food of love, severance and betrayal. Ella Hunt dazzles as Alice – a beautiful, scruffy siren with mauve hair and ripped tights who sings like a delicate sister to Chrissie Hynde. Jack Farthing is great as Dan, a weasly, entitled, self-pitying chain-smoker who works “in the Siberia of journalism” on the obits page and whose joke – “It’s a living” – flops lifelessly. Anna is a poised photographer who never lets her own image slip – lovely work by Nina Toussaint-White. The dialogue is poised, no matter what the mood. When Alice asks Anna, just after she has taken photos of Dan: “Did you steal his soul?”, Anna replies: “Would you like some tea?” The words in each sentence are evenly weighed, to comic perfection, as though their meaning were exactly equivalent.
