Closer

Description

There's a moment. There's always a moment . . . Dan rescues Alice. Anna photographs Dan. Larry meets Anna online. Alice rescues Larry. This is London at the end of the twentieth century where lives collide and fates change in an instant. Strangers become lovers and lovers become strangers . . . On its premiere in 1997, Closer won Olivier, Evening Standard and New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards. Since then, the play has been produced in more than 200 cities across the world. This edition of the play was published to coincide with the production at the Donmar Warehouse, London, in February 2015.

Patrick Marber was born in London. His first play, Dealer's Choice, premiered at the Royal National Theatre, London, in February 1995. It won the Evening Standard Award for Best Comedy and the Writers' Guild Award for Best West End Play. Closer premiered at the Royal National Theatre in May 1997. It won the Evening Standard Award for Best Comedy and the Critics' Circle Award and Laurence Olivier Award for Best Play. Closer premiered on Broadway in March 1999 where it won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Foreign Play. Howard Katz premiered at the Royal National Theatre, London, in September 2001. Patrick Marber has also written extensively for television and radio including After Miss Julie (BBC, 1995).

Patrick Marber's searing follow-up to Dealer's Choice establishes him as the leading playwright of his generation. * Independent on Sunday * Love and sex are like politics: it's not what you say that matters, still less what you mean, but what you do. Patrick Marber understands this perfectly, and in Closer he has written one of the best plays of sexual politics in the language: it is right up there with Williams's Streetcar, Mamet's Oleanna, Albee's Virginia Woolf, Pinter's Old Times and Hare's Skylight. * Sunday Times * . . . a surprisingly warm homage to London's secret corners . . . Marber writes perceptively about our obsession with appearances, the perils of honesty, and the damage we can do to others in the name of love. . . . his dialogue remains wickedly sharp. * Evening Standard * Marber's portrait of the failure of men and women to achieve spiritual as well as sexual intimacy seems as powerful and pertinent as ever. . . . Marber's play is much more than the product of its time. It is an alarmingly durable, well-structured play about the distance between men and women and the restless neediness of love. * Guardian * The cold brilliance of 'Closer' lies in Marber's understanding that it could never be set in a small town. . . . As London becomes more anonymous, 'Closer' becomes more truthful. * Time Out London * The play has not dated * Financial Times * Patrick Marber's 1997 comedy of sexual manners brings us up close to the games of hide-and-seek men and women play with each other and themselves. * Sunday Times * The plotting is intricate, the dialogue stark and stabbing. * Mail on Sunday * Patrick Marber's four-hander about love, sex and relationships still has the power to wound. . . . Closer painfully strips back the skin to probe at how telling a lie, or confessing the truth, can be a kindness or a cruelty. . . . Marber's famously explicit script is as good at delivering witty zingers and power-play banter . . . as it is at the revelatory moments where people seem surprised at their own capacity to feel hurt, and to hurt others. * Independent * Marber's comic set-pieces are as good as Monty Python. And his emotionally harrowing passages are a match for Pinter's best play Betrayal, which is clearly the inspiration for this work. . . . Marber has that Chekhovian knack of making you feel not just that you know the people on stage but that you actually are them. How easily you could embrace their chic wit, their savage anger, their cool loaded dialogue and their harassed, bustling, lonely, morbid and sex-fixated lives. * Spectator * a profound and moving exploration of the search for intimacy by four mismatched Londoners. * Sunday Express *