Newsday - "Closer" Review

Lies in Fiction Can Be True

By Linda Winer. STAFF WRITER

CLOSER. Written and directed by Patrick Marber. With Natasha Richardson, Rupert Graves, Anna Friel, Ciaran Hinds. Sets and costumes by Vicki Mortimer, lights by Hugh Vanstone. Royal National Theatre production at the Music Box, 45th Street west of Broadway. Seen at Tuesday's preview.

WHAT A NASTY bit of work is "Closer" - nasty, dirty-talking, loveless and, oh, yes, riveting erotic theater. It also happens to be a lot less meaningful or important than its author-director Patrick Marber and its wheelbarrows of recent London awards would have us believe. Chances are, however, audiences will be too seduced - or, in sensitive cases, bludgeoned - by its hard-edged sexual politics and electrifying actors to notice the emptiness, until the darkly funny, aggressively unromantic comedy is over.

And that's OK. Indeed, "Closer," which opened at the Music Box last night in the Royal National Theatre production and a new cast, is a slick kick - even if we can't guarantee you'll respect yourself in the morning for admiring it. Marber, whose neater but less textured "Dealer's Choice" had a brief run recently at Manhattan Theatre Club, has written a lean, brutal, four-character study of '90s relationships in which the pursuit of truth is the biggest lie. He also has written Broadway's best - also its first - adventure in cybersex. Odd how much more shocking X-rated flirtations seem when typed on a humungous computer screen above an old-fashioned Broadway stage.

Marber's subjects are love, abandonment and death, but his material is sex. Rather than bringing people "closer," his couplings ultimately just reinforce humanity's aloneness. These characters - played with exquisite honesty by Natasha Richardson, Rupert Graves, Anna Friel and Ciaran Hinds - talk about sensations with the articulate blunt cruelty that's usually left in fiction to emotional subtext. David Mamet's people use sex words as poetic metaphor. Marber uses them as sex. In his world, kindness is the equivalent of boredom. And the most dogged seekers of truth, naturally, are the biggest liars. The play peeks into key moments in four and a half years of couples - don't look for classic dramatic unities here. Marber, clearly a gifted director, deftly stages the courtships and betrayals in a series of short, intelligent, staccato scenes - sometimes presented simultaneously, as if on a split screen - on Vicki Mortimer's minimal and versatile set. A series of mysterious rectangles are hung up and down the back wall like faceless paintings at a museum. Their significance is a secret we won't ruin here. We can say, however, that his recurring use of Postman's Park, a London memorial to martyrs who gave their lives to save others, is as bogus and pretentious as anything spouted by his most self-deceptive characters.

Marber, who reportedly got his inspiration from an upscale strip club in Atlanta, has put his heart, such as it is, into the dangerously sentimental notion of the noble young stripper. His Alice - played with a spectacular mixture of street smarts and neediness by Anna Friel - carries the most freight. He gives her the self-knowledge to mockingly refer to herself as a "waif," but also burdens her with the purest soul around. We first meet Alice and Dan (played with eviscerating boyish cruelty by Rupert Graves) in a hospital emergency room. Although Alice never strikes us as the sort who wanders carelessly into traffic, she has been hit by a car - apparently not the first time, definitely not the last. She and Dan, an obituary writer and would-be novelist, talk cute in linguistically self-conscious ways. The gash on her shin matches the color of her shoes (sharp costumes also by Mortimer). Nice touch in a play where a doctor describes the heart as "a fist wrapped in blood." Richardson, back onstage after her Tony-winning breakthrough in "Cabaret," is Anna, the photographer who shoots Dan's portrait for the novel he has apparently written during the blackout between scenes. Anna may be Marber's least-fleshed-out character, but we would never know it from Richardson's elegantly nuanced, surprisingly physical performance. In the photo shoot, where Dan starts cheating on Alice, Richardson moves with the slinky joy of a cocky professional. At her photo exhibition, she's a bit tipsy. As the deceptions accumulate, her pointy, pouty, intelligent face is unequivocally post-coital, then guilty, then weary. What a pleasure she is.

Then there is Hinds, the only holdover from the London cast, balancing giddily on the thin line between obnoxiously oily and pathetically likable. He plays Larry, the dermatologist with decent political instincts and an appetite for rough sex. In his chilling scene at Alice's strip club, he lashes out about the impossibility of sexual understanding. You see, women "don't understand the territory," because "they are the territory." But Marber is too clever to stack the deck in favor of the women. They're hardly more innocent than the men. Although Alice mouths cynical observations about what men want from women, really, the women get a few bursts of hilarious insights that, at a recent preview, made the audience applaud in recognition. This may not be a world we care to recognize and, indeed, we're not sure even Marber believes the emptiness of it all. Alice describes Anna's photo exhibit as a lie because it makes the sad beautiful. Marber makes the sad seductive. And it's nasty fun, even if we don't have to buy it in the kinder - not necessarily boring - light of day.