Playbill Online - "Closer" Review
26-MAR-99
Well, whaddayaknow! This year’s blonde is last year’s blonde -- and
nobody’s more amazed about that than Natasha Richardson herself. Even before the dust
could settle on the Tony she got last June as Cabaret’s uninhibited Sally Bowles, she
has boomeranged back to Broadway to play another brazen Brit -- one of the cool,
contemporary customers found between, and under, the covers of Patrick Marber’s dark,
searing play, Closer.
Yes, the color of Her Blondeness is basically the same, but the cut is more stylish.
“It won’t be Sally hair,” she insists. “I’m not going to look
like a messed-up slut. I’ll look like an artist, somebody who works -- somebody
who’s very feminine, I hope.”
Hope, of course, won’t have anything to do with it. Class and breeding and sheer
ability will see her down this latest road to rocky erotica. When you think about it,
Richardson’s whole theatre career in this country embraces only about three Broadway
blocks and never veers from the Primrose Path. When she first came on as the new girl in
town, she was the Roundabout’s Anna Christie, Eugene O’Neill’s weary
Scandinavian wanton who finds redemption in the love of a good man (played by Liam Neeson,
a very good man indeed for Richardson); both performers won Tony nominations, and the
production itself took the Tony for Best Revival of 1994. Last year, she made her musical
debut in the Roundabout-renovated Kit Kat Klub on 43rd Street, and, in addition to the
Tony she won for her work in Cabaret, the Roundabout wound up with another for Best
Revival of 1998.
Now she’s back on 45th Street, three theatres down from the Roundabout at the Music
Box, in Closer, an opus with its own cluster of English awards (the 1998 Olivier Award for
Best New Play, the 1998 Critics’ Circle winner for Best Play, the 1997 Time Out Award
for Best West End Play and the 1997 Evening Standard Award for Best Comedy).
Although he had no compunction whatsoever about picking up that last prize, Marber has
publicly admitted that he did not realize he had written a comedy. Indeed, the general
feeling seems to be that if this is rib tickling, then the author is using a stiletto,
operating treacherously close to the raw, exposed nerves of modern-day man-woman
relationships.
The given is two couples and how they never completely add up. Dan, an obituary
writer-turned-novelist (Rupert Graves), cheats on his stripper girlfriend, Alice (Anna
Friel), with his portrait photographer, Anna (Richardson), who is married to Larry (Ciaran
Hinds), a pornography-loving dermatologist smitten with the stripper -- and around they go
in ever widening circles. Marber, whose gambling background enabled him to write his
previous hit Dealer’s Choice, plays every possible combination. Even the guys
unwittingly hook up on the Internet for an obscene chat, a perfect sign-of-the-times
fillip.
“This won’t be a play for everyone,” cautions Richardson. “It’s
for an intelligent theatregoer who wants to see something exciting and raw and new, but
it’s going to shock people. Some people won’t like it, and that’s fine
because I think it’s important to make people feel and react and think, not
necessarily to make them feel good or a bit teary.”
She includes herself as someone who was initially upset by Closer. “I was scared by
the play when I saw it in London. Some of the things that are said are personal to me.
Some of it touches areas in my life. It’s a difficult, but perhaps cathartic, place
for me to go.”
But go she must, and go she did, although she put up a good struggle against doing the
play. “I turned it down three times,” she recalls. “The producers were very
insistent. After the third time I said no -- and it was always not because I didn’t
like the play but because it was too soon for me to go back in the theatre -- I spent the
whole weekend letting the idea settle in that I had passed this up. A special piece of
contemporary writing like Closer does not come along very often, and I thought,
‘I’ve missed a great opportunity,’ so I called them back after the weekend
and said, ‘I’ve made a mistake. Will you still have me?’ Thank goodness,
they said yes.”
The contemporary setting was a key attraction to Closer for Richardson: Broadway would
finally see her as a woman of her own times. “It’s interesting playing someone
who is much closer to myself. In a funny way, that presents a different kind of challenge.
I don’t know if I can explain why it seems to be equally difficult to pull out
something that’s close to you as something that’s further away. Maybe you can
lose yourself more in a character that’s different. I am different. This woman is not
the same as I am, but there are areas of our lives where we’ve been in similar
situations.”
Richardson felt her own difference would make a different Closer on Broadway. “I
thought if I did it, I would need to bring something different to it, so Patrick and I had
many talks before I finally decided to come on board. The London cast was great, but
I’m a different person. I bring a slightly different sensibility to it. I’m an
actress who loves Williams and O’Neill, so I’m more emotional. I just feel
it’s going to be different here -- a more human approach to the play, a less cool
approach. Less analytical and more heart.”
The only obstruction to Richardson’s vision is that Marber has upped the ante and is
directing the piece himself, so she counts this as something of a mixed blessing.
“It’s great in some ways and very difficult in others,” she says.
“It’s great because he knows whenever you’re in trouble. He knows the whole
back story, the intention behind every line. But it’s also quite hard because he has
a very specific view of how it should be, and sometimes, if you have a different approach,
it’s hard to contradict him because he’s the author.”
One of the producers most insistent that Richardson do Closer is an ex-husband, Robert
Fox. “We were together for eight years, but we were only married for two of those
years,” she says. Then along came Anna Christie and Liam Neeson, her husband of four
years and the father of her two young sons. “Anna Christie was one of the best
experiences of my professional life. It was the moment when the director and the piece and
Liam and I all came together. It’s a thrilling experience when you know that
there’s something kind of electric happening.” Privately, her marriage to Fox
didn’t survive the shock, but they have remained friends in the best British
stiff-upper-lip fashion. “It doesn’t feel very Noel Coward,” she admits.
“It feels like Closer. You’ll know what I mean when you see it.”
--Harry Haun