Labyrinth Production’s staging of Patrick Marber’s 1997 play, Closer, was an ambitious move for a student-run production company. Ambitious as it was, the cast themselves put on a strong showing; my major problems with the play stemmed from the original script, rather than their production of it.
Closer depicts a series of betrayals, affairs, and reunions between two couples: on the one hand, Alice (Catherine Williams-Boyle), a self-proclaimed ‘waif’, and aspiring writer, Dan (Vasco Faria); on the other, rising photographer Anna (Vita Hamilton) and dermatologist Larry (Robert Wolfreys). Their relationships and brutal honesty with each other are ostensibly driven by an obsession with the truth – although to me, it felt far more like an obsession with ownership over the lives and minds of their partners.
Williams-Boyle embodied the character of Alice confidently, eyes literally glittering in her opening conversation with Dan as he waits with her in the hospital. Hamilton played Anna with an admirable restraint, sometimes lingering on pauses for so long that I worried she had forgotten her lines, a worry only assuaged by the fact that every minutiae of Anna’s thinking was made visible on her face. Faria and Wolfreys both excelled when their characters are at their worst – Larry in his vengeance and sudden anger, Dan at the peak of his pettiness.
The staging was also artful, with a grid on the floor made out of white tape emphasising the physical and emotional distance between the characters. One particular scene saw four chairs situated at each corner, moving back and forth through time between Anna’s meeting with Larry to insist on him signing their divorce papers, to her reunion with Dan only a few hours later, to reveal that she had had to sleep with Larry in order to get the papers signed. Each pair sat at opposite ends of a diagonal from each other, leaving the audience anxiously waiting for the characters to bridge the space between.
The one aspect of acting that I remained unconvinced by was the chemistry between Anna and Dan, despite the conflict of the play hinging on their affair. The build-up of tension felt rushed, with their first interaction – Anna taking photos of Dan for his new book, an account of Alice’s life – finishing in a 15-second long makeout by the end of the scene. With little discernible reason for their attraction to each other beyond Dan’s melodramatic declarations that he simply could not live without her, I never found myself fully believing in the passion between the two, nor understanding what it was that drew both Dan and Larry repeatedly back to Anna.
The ‘searing honesty’ of Marber’s dialogue appeared mainly (and repetitively) in obsessive arguments between the four characters about the sexual intimacies that their cheating was comprised of: questions of “Did he make you come?” and “Was he better than me?” came up again and again, in roughly the same form. After the third or fourth iteration of this conversation, I found myself bored and infuriated by the lack of change in these characters, rather than impressed by the cast’s passionate deliveries.
It’s plausible that the portrayals could have been improved by demonstrating nuanced shifts between the characters in each version of this argument – nonetheless, the problem belonged firmly to the original script, not the production. Every scene felt like it was delivering similar beats of betrayal, anger, and vengeance, and it was futile to expect something else.
Marber’s writing was also peppered with out-of-place pseudo-revelations, ranging from “without forgiveness, we’re savages” to “Our flesh is ferocious. Our bodies will kill us. Our bones will outlive us.” These lines were dropped in the script so abruptly that any artful effect is dispelled, seemingly just to reveal some level of great intellect on the part of the writer. This kind of inanity is difficult to redeem, no matter the skill of the actors themselves.
Another aspect that took away from my immersion was as mundane as the age gap between the actors and the characters they were meant to be playing. This was a point that the cast had already acknowledged in an earlier interview about the play. The director, Rosie Morgan-Males, told Cherwell: “Aside from Catty playing Alice, we’re not that close to the playing age of the characters. So I think in those instances, it’s really important to see how much emotion we can draw from it, rather than creat[ing] a really realistic study of four 20 to 40 year olds.”
The cast of Closer certainly did succeed in doing so. The emotional vicissitudes were particularly pronounced and well-acted in the first half of the play: Anna and Larry’s break-up just before the intermission was one of the stand-out moments of the performance for me, with Wolfreys and Hamilton building up to a mesmerising intensity in the final beat of the scene.
Use of space built upon the explosive dynamics here skillfully as well. The middle of the studio was initially split along the diagonal, with each couple taking up one half and allowing the audience to flick back and forth between their spitfire arguments. The departure of Alice and Dan from the scene felt like the emotional equivalent of letting a lion out of a circus cage – Anna and Larry encroach into the newly freed space instantly, pacing furiously around the room and chasing each other across the stage. Wolfreys did particularly well here: we got a glimpse of the viciousness and vengeance waiting just under Larry’s skin, to be peeled back and revealed again throughout the second half of the play.
When such moments of high intensity were counter-balanced with moments of cynical humour and irony (think Dan posed as Anna in an online chatroom, sexting Larry), the play felt strongest. It was unfortunate that Marber’s script failed to lean into this variation, or demonstrate another aspect of the characters that audiences could respond to. Such variation would have also highlighted the abilities of the undeniably skilled cast; what resulted was Marber’s failure, not theirs.
