Clive Owen Stage Work

Closer

Extracts from the reviews (Cottesloe Theatre, with first cast) ""Thank God life ends. We'd never survive it!" Thus the doctor in Patrick Marber's wonderful new comedy of sex and modern manners. Marber, who writes for and with Steve Coogan on TV, made an accomplished playwriting debut with his poker play Dealer's Choice at the National two years ago. Closer has only four characters but is infinitely more striking, a sort of Private Lives for the late 1990s, with brutal language to match and an ingenious narrative scheme which duplicates the relationships into the musical form of a quadrille. The doctor Larry (Ciaran Hinds) tends Alice (Liza Walker), a waif-like stripper and free spirit, who has grazed her leg in a road accident. She has been plucked from the kerb by a journalist, Dan (Clive Owen), who works in obituaries. The fourth participant is the photographer Anna (Sally Dexter) who exhibits a portrait of Alice after photographing Dan for his new book jacket. Dan fancies Anna, having started to live with Alice, who in turn intrigues Larry. In one brilliantly hilarious scene, which establishes the Internet as an unexpected agent of new drama, Dan and Larry communicate in a web-site dialogue projected on the back wall. The action, covering about four years, is fluidly arranged within a governing visual metaphor of mortality, the glazed Doulton tablets in the London public gardens known as Postman's Park. There, Alice has found her identity. There, Dan once shared an egg sandwich with his dad. There, forgotten people are remembered. But not dying means living, and loving. The French call each orgasm un petit mort. Marber's characters set about raising this common condition to a malingering disease. The play reeks of hilarious discussion about sex, jealous cross-questioning and accusations. ('You're old enough to be her ancestor!' cries a disgusted Anna after a new infidelity hits the bedstead.) The two men glide in and out of the same scene as Anna deals with them in differing time planes, deciding to sleep with Larry for old time's sake while Dan compels her to tell the truth about his potency. Marber directs his own blisteringly well-written play, in this case a good idea as it has emerged slowly from the National's invaluable studio facility. Every life matters a lot is the ultimate message of a comedy that seems ironically to celebrate the wonders of physical indulgence and satiety. This is the best acted play in London, the sexiest and the most profoundly uplifting. A palpable hit." The Daily Mail