Closer (Methuen Modern Plays) (Modern Classics)

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Larry's line to Dan, "Have you ever seen a human heart? It looks like a fist wrapped in blood", is used by Canadian post-hardcore band Silverstein as a title to the song " Fist Wrapped in Blood" on their 2005 album Discovering the Waterfront.

As an actor you look at every piece from your character’s perspective. You read a play or film with one character in mind. To play two parts in a piece like Closer was a totally new thing for me. I knew the play, the rhythms of the language, the impact of certain things but was now looking from Larry’s perspective. It felt both new and familiar. It was like I’d been given the most incredible gift. Equally, Anna may be a highly successful snapper whose portraits adorn gallery walls and museum shops, but Nancy Carroll’s vividly expressive eyes convey the same vulnerability and solitude she finds in her subjects. Still, it remains a bravura piece of playwriting. Closer is like a minimalist kaleidoscope, each scene a tiny shift of the dial that produces a new configuration between two of the four characters. Dan, a writer, is with Alice, a stripper, but falls for Anna, a photographer, who has married Larry a doctor but who leaves him for Dan, leaving Larry to hunt down Alice, and so on. All four treat each other as pawns moved around a chess board, each character brutalised by each manipulation. Few plays present sex so pitilessly as a weapon of humiliation and possession. Sam Troughton's Larry in particular is breathtakingly unrepentant in his swaggeringly self abasing displays of neanderthal desire. Shaddup and sadly, the banal out-of-context dialogue doesn’t even begin to capture some of the wit that Marber brings to his play. Mike Nichols produced and directed the film adaptation of the same name in 2004, starring Jude Law, Clive Owen, Natalie Portman and Julia Roberts. The film was nominated for 27 awards and won the BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor (Clive Owen) and two Golden Globes for Best Supporting Actor and Actress (Clive Owen and Natalie Portman). The story of CloserI would recommend this. It is on my favorites list but that is for the film more so then the play. I just think the power of the movie was utterly amazing. The line Anna speaks to Larry, "He tastes like you, only sweeter", is used in the 2007 Fall Out Boy song " Thnks fr th Mmrs". Also, the line spoken by Larry to Alice/Jane in the strip club, "I love everything about you that hurts", is used in the Fall Out Boy song "G.I.N.A.S.F.S.".

Anyone who has seen the play or the film does not need me to describe the story. This is one of my all time favorite films. I have also read the play version and that is what I am reviewing.And I have one final quote, which is quite a long single speech from Anna, which I really enjoyed. Talking about relationships and men: Closer is extremely heavy on the self-awareness. But there are no fully developed themes, no sense of a driving, overwhelming question. Love is bleak and sterile in Closer - but it's not enough that Marber has shown us the bleak sterility of love and sexual attraction through a joyless cybersex scene in the beginning. No, he hammers the point home with such tell-don't-show voracity that, yes, it was convincing. It was also incredibly tiresome. It wants to be Lolita, another subversive text all about how we tell stories and how characters use lies and self-awareness with perhaps the biggest taboo of all. Unlike Lolita, though, there's no flesh on these bones. Closer is nothing but the cold, rigid, sterile, metal bones of a good idea but, instead of developing it, pushing it, Marber leaves it just as a good idea. Any impression on the audience comes from the fact that he's merely raising these points about sex and intimacy and men and women, but he doesn't push them. He doesn't follow them through. Alice says of Dan's love at one point: A year later, Dan has written a novel based on Alice's life. While being photographed to publicise it, he flirts with the American photographer Anna Cameron. They share a kiss before Alice arrives. While she uses the bathroom, Dan tries to persuade Anna to have an affair with him but their conversation is cut short by Alice's return. There is a fascinating theme about identity which rumbles through the play. Dan steals Alice’s identity – her story for the book he writes. Then in a central scene where Larry and Dan exchange messages via computer, Dan pretends to be Anna to flirt with Larry. And then finally we learn that Alice was a name that she stole from one of the memorials in Postman’s Park – a young woman that died having saved children from a fire. It is only at the end that we discover she is called Jane, and she was telling Larry her true name just before the scene above in the strip club. The only time she was truthful and he didn’t believe her.