reviewvancouver: Closer

British playwright, Patrick Marber is currently best known for his brilliant screenplay for the film Notes on a Scandal, starring Dame Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett. Closer is uncannily similar to it in as much that it merges the same basic themes of sex and betrayal. Furthermore, they are both absorbing without being particularly entertaining.

Marber’s play is a dark un-romantic comedy, set in London, more or less at the present time and it follows two men and two women with seriously flawed characters and their rapacious mating games.

We first meet Dan, a self-consumed, under-achieving writer, and Alice, a free-spirited exotic performer, in a hospital waiting-area after Alice is injured in a traffic accident. They strike up an immediate relationship, and in the next scene, obviously several months later, Alice has become Dan’s regular soulmate. Moreover, he has written a book about her life. At this point we meet Anna, a soulless, jaded photographer who regards her clients simply as “jobs.” She is lured into a sordid tryst with Dan during his photo session.

Finally, we meet Larry, an egocentric dermatologist, in what is arguably the funniest scene in the whole play. He and Dan are exchanging sexual fantasies over an internet chat room. The only direct dialogue is between lap-tops, with the text scrolled onto a screen for the benefit of the audience. Larry is tricked into believing he is “chatting” with a woman and accepts a blind date with whom he believes to be Anna.

Sonja Bennett as Alice has the most to do, and she certainly does it well. In the eye-opening lap-dance scene that sets up the second act, she is both belligerent and beguiling in not much more than a baby-doll négligé, high heels, and a black wig. Despite the close proximity of front row patrons in the tiny Havana theatre, she somehow manages to maintain complete focus.

Cast against type, Allison Hossack is convincing as Anna. She appears in total control in every scene she is in, yet, reveals a honest vulnerability, playing the bruised survivor to a tee. Stephen Lobo and Ted Whittal fare less well as Dan and Larry, respectively. This may be due in part to Marber’s curious back-and-forth, stichomyhic style of presenting dialogue that suits female actors better than male ones.

Director Aaron Craven and his technical staff make the most of minimal stage props: essentially using the same set layout in all of the dozen scenes that are relied on to move the story through a five-year period. An astute assortment of slides projected onto a screen provides locale reference to each the scenes.

Marber offers little subtlety in this play. There is a coup de théâtre at the end, which seems an attempt at irony. But the real irony is perhaps in the title: after a carnal merry-go-round, the four exponents end up “Far apart.”