CLOSER (PLAY)

'''Closer''' is the second play written by Patrick Marber. Set in contemporary London, it tells the story of four people in the "body business"^[1] — Dan the obituary writer, Alice the stripper, Anna the photographer, and Larry the dermatologist — who over a period of years meet and fall in love. It has been described as a work that "gets under its audience’s skin, and ... not for the emotionally squeamish", a work in which "Marber is alert to the cruel inequalities of love, as the characters change partners in what sometimes comes over like a modern reworking of Coward’s ''Private Lives''"^[2].
Marber described the play's "construction" in an October 1999 interview:
:The idea was always to create something that has a formal beauty into which you could shove all this anger and fury. I hoped the dramatic power of the play would rest on that tension between elegant structure – the underlying plan is that you see the first and last meeting of every couple in the play – and inelegant emotion.²
The play was made into a 2004 film of the same name, also written by Marber and directed by Mike Nichols. As part of the film adaptation, the seventh scene of the play was dissected, with various lines spread throughout the movie version. Marber was also able to eliminate dialogue from the play in scenes where film permits the actors to communicate nonverbally.^[3]. Jokes from the play which proved to be dated were also omitted³.

Contents

Major productions

Trivia

References

External links

Major productions

It premiered in the Cottesloe auditorium at the Royal National Theatre on May 22, 1997. The Cottesloe cast featured Clive Owen as Dan, Liza Walker as Alice, Sally Dexter as Anna, and Ciarán Hinds as Larry.
The play won the 1997 ''Evening Standard'' Best Comedy Award and the 1998 Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play^[4].
It moved to the West End in March 1998. The West End cast included Lloyd Owen as Dan, Liza Walker as Alice, Frances Barber as Anna, and Neil Pearson as Larry.
It received its Paris premiere on December 22, 1998 at the Theatre Fontaine, in a production based on a French translation by Pierre Laville and directed by Patrice Kerbrat^[5]. The production starred Anne Brochet as Alice, Caroline Sihol as Anna, Jean-Philippe Ecoffey as Larry and Gad Elmaleh as Dan⁵.
The play premiered on Broadway on March 25, 1999 at the Music Box Theatre. On Broadway, Anna Friel, Rupert Graves, and Natasha Richardson joined Ciarán Hinds (from the original London cast). ''Closer'' ran for 172 performances on Broadway during 1999, with Polly Draper replacing Richardson starting June 15^[6]. ''Closer'' won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Foreign Play and was
nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play in 1999^[7].
Early productions of ''Closer'' on the West Coast of the United States include one featuring Maggie Gyllenhaal as Alice in a Berkeley Repertory Theatre production in May 2000 (directed by Wilson Milam)^[8], and another also featuring Gyllenhaal opposite Rebecca De Mornay as Anna in a Mark Taper Forum production in December 2000, directed by Robert Egan^[9].
As of 2001^[10], the play has been produced in more than a hundred cities in over thirty different languages around the world.

Trivia

★ During a 2004 interview Marber commented on the audience's early reactions to a scene from the play where two of the actors interact via a cybersex chat room:
::It's lovely on the stage. We had an enormous screen that would lower down with the two actors on either side so you saw them typing and the words would just appear on the screen. When the play premiered in May 1997 in London, at least half the audience didn't know what that scene was. You can trace the rise of the Internet really from that night. May '97, I would watch the audience and I could just tell that the majority, in fact, had no idea what they were watching. Whereas the younger people in the audience absolutely knew, oh my God they're in a chat room. We've never seen this done before. It hadn't been done on stage or in film before and it felt very new and very strange and radical and it played to complete silence, shocked awe. It was at the National Theatre in London which is a respectable, subsidized theater and people were amazed. And it wasn't until the critics came a week after previews had started and said there's this really funny Internet scene that people started laughing³.

References

1. http://www.albemarle-london.com/closer2.html (quoting a review in ''The Times'')
2. http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/?lid=2634
3. http://www.movieweb.com/news/76/6076.php
4. http://www.playbill.com/news/article/78120.html
5. http://www.playbill.com/news/article/42658.html
6. http://www.playbill.com/news/article/45815.html
7. http://www.playbill.com/news/article/45894.html
8. http://www.playbill.com/news/article/52896.html
9. http://www.playbill.com/news/article/57285.html
10. http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth255

External links

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