Official/press reviews and articles

[rueful]

Feb 24, 2015 0:29:23 GMT GreenEyesToo said:

If you go to Profile > edit profile> settings, then look for Posting Default - the choice is Preview or BBCode, and I have the latter checked. See if that helps. If not, I'll put up the links as well.

ADDED to say that I just changed the code in the embedded tweets from https to http - so can you see them now, Rueful?

Thanks for the info on how to check it. The setting was already in BBCode. And I'm sorry to say the change from http to https hasn't helped. That's ok, I can always just search twitter myself.

Thanks for all the great stuff you found tonight!

[BuildersPassion]

GE2 for posting this very interesting articles and everything you found! 

[walt]

so much for finding and posting these intriguing reviews, GE2!



Like Rueful I cannot see the tweets you posted, but it doesn't matter, I looked them up (using Firefox, profile already set to BBCode).

[nell]

I know - that's what I've said!! (You're soooo easily dazzled by a pic of Rufus! )

LOL! No still can't see where you wrote that

(Um.......".....with its four characters never appearing together on stage" - did he watch the right play??? )

I won't repost the link. They don't deserve it. How about the opening scene when all 4 were on stage? To be fair he can't have been able to see too well with his head stuck up his ass  

[kissmekate]

, thanks for finding and posting. That first pic

[midoro]

Thanks for posting the reviews and pics GE2! The first pic is lovely!

[lassie]

GE2 for taking the time to search and post. Hope you got some sleep!

[kygal]

Thanks for all the posts, links and pictures. Most of the reviews and tweets have been positive.

[adina]

Oh, the wonderful picture that GE2 posted from The Guardian article is quite big, so click on its link: i.guim.co.uk/static/w-1920/h--/q-95/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2015/2/23/1424706171628/0879c1a8-2e9c-47c4-8151-a4b9ae81d8ac-2060x1236.jpeg
This must be the divorce papers scene - hah, what a facial expression!!! Bitterness à la Rufus.


The Telegraph used a new photo! www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/11423246/Closer-Donmar-Warehouse-review.html



Closer, Donmar Warehouse, review: 'cooly controlled'
Jane Shilling

When Patrick Marber’s award-winning third play, Closer, premiered at the National Theatre in 1997, it drew comparisons with Noel Coward, Harold Pinter and Choderlos de Laclos’s chilly 18th-century sex-tragedy, Les Liaisons Dangereuses. The drama portrays an agonised sexual and emotional square dance between a quartet of articulate people preoccupied with the restless pursuit of sex and love, discovering to their chagrin that those two urgent imponderables are not necessarily reconcilable.

Dan (Oliver Chris), is an obituaries editor with the soulful allure of a chap who spends his days thinking about the recently dead. He gallantly escorts Alice (Rachel Redford), a waiflike part-time stripper, to A&E after she is run over by a taxi. There she is briefly examined by Larry (Rufus Sewell), a dermatologist.

Fast-forward a year and Dan, now living with Alice, has written a book about her experiences. He has his author photograph taken by Anna (Nancy Carroll), an attractive photographer with whom he falls in love as abruptly as he fell for Alice. Anna rejects him, though with a tinge of equivocation. Alice, overhearing the conversation, is distraught. In an internet chat room Dan encounters Larry and, impersonating Anna, arranges an encounter. And so it continues, each new coupling more more emotionally wrenching than the last.

Closer was written at a time when a generation of young playwrights, including Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill, were making bold experiments with the power of drama to question and disturb. Marber’s forensic dissection of his characters’ unsettling blend of anxiety, amorality and reluctant romanticism, and the elegant brutality of his play’s language and sexual mores seemed a disturbing reflection of their time.

Almost two decades on, the shock value has slightly eroded to leave the play’s intricate, ludic structure interestingly exposed in David Leveaux’s coolly controlled revival. Bunny Christie’s monochrome set of interlocking angles neatly echoes the diagrammatic permutations of the relationships between characters whose occupations hint at an almost Jacobean obsession with the skull beneath the skin.

With its power to outrage somewhat mellowed, Closer appears a play as preoccupied with the workings-out of its own exquisitely ingenious structure as with a deeper human truth. Nancy Carroll finds an emotional complexity in Anna that stands at a slight angle to her colleagues’ less nuanced performances in a play whose dazzlingly enjoyable qualities of intelligence and wit don’t quite constitute an insight into the human condition.


Well, the article let me see Doctor Larry being busy, but otherwise it's not too informative. The next one reveals that there is an oversized shark, so I gather information bit by bit.

www.britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/closer-donmar-warehous-11230

Review by Philip Fisher

For anyone who might have doubted the fact, David Leveaux's revival proves that Closer is a modern classic, fit to compare with Harold Pinter's Betrayal in its depiction of the joys and pains of love and sexual politics.
It seems unbelievable that Patrick Marber's play should have seen the light of day close to two decades ago, such is the freshness of the writing and the timelessness of the subject matter.
Closer features a love quadrangle featuring four damaged individuals riding the crest of the London wave in the last days of the Thatcher-Major era.
Visitors might well have differing views as to who is the central character but let us start with Rachel Redford's Alice, a free-spirited stripper with heart who describes herself as a waif and has a death-wish. This is evidenced during the opening in which Oliver Chris as feckless Dan peels her off the road and takes the accident-prone young woman to hospital.
It isn't surprising that the damsel in distress falls for her imperfect knight, even if he is an obituarist and wannabe novelist.
He is also inconstant, soon chasing after Nancy Carroll's Anna, a photographer with a knack of picking the wrong men.
She completes the square, with assistance from Dan who suckers Larry, a porn-obsessed, hospital doctor portrayed by Rufus Sewell, into a love tryst.
Rather than using an old-fashioned go-between, he achieves this in the first instance of Internet chatrooms in theatre by pretending to be voracious Anna during a hilarious scene that brought the house down first time around and still hits the bull's-eye in today's technologically savvy, sex-obsessed age.
Immediately afterwards, in a telling image on a large video screen that sets many scenes, the duped couple meet in an aquarium under the chilling eyes of an oversized shark.
The acting during the 2½-hour performance lives up to the razor-sharp script, with Rufus Sewell peaking when Larry gets most stressed, while Nancy Carroll is a self-effacing dream and, in the least developed role, Oliver Chris shows that he can be serious following his success in One Man Two Guvnors.
Relative newcomer Rachel Redford will become a star overnight, easily keeping pace with her more experienced colleagues and showing genuine vulnerability and strength as the mysterious Alice.
There are many reasons to visit or revisit Closer. It is very funny with quick-fire repartee, deeply moving and contains real insight into the way that ordinary Londoners live today, just as much as it shone a spotlight on their existence when it premièred in the Cottesloe in 1997.
Most of all though it is peopled by real, breathing human beings of the kind that you could bump into in any art gallery, hospital or street. Like you or me, they do their jobs, believe in their art and ride the rollercoasters between love, lust and despair with a mixture of hope, optimism and their polar opposites.
The Donmar is currently on a roll and there has to be every possibility that this wonderful production will follow My Night with Reg into a larger West End home in the very near future.


It ended with a wish!
The Evening Standard review added the "demented sensitivity" phrase to my Closer picture. www.standard.co.uk/goingout/theatre/closer-donmar-warehouse--theatre-review-rufus-sewell-is-on-thrilling-form-in-this-first-revival-of-patrick-marbers-play-10066769.html

When it premiered at the National Theatre in 1997, Closer was instantly acclaimed as an intricate and savvy study of modern relationships in all their chilly brutality — Noël Coward for the internet generation, although it was also less charitably described as a cross between Men Behaving Badly and Last Tango in Paris.

Now getting its first major revival, Patrick Marber’s play still feels shrewdly observed. It also comes across as a surprisingly warm homage to London’s secret corners — notably Postman’s Park near St Paul’s, site of a memorial to ordinary people who died saving the lives of others.

What’s missing, though, is real passion. Rufus Sewell is on thrilling form as Larry, a dermatologist who veers between a caveman’s lust and moments of demented sensitivity. But elsewhere David Leveaux’s production feels stilted.

Individually the performances work. Nancy Carroll has poise and a nervy vulnerability as photographer Anna. Oliver Chris brings a mix of puppyish youth and destructive neediness to aspiring novelist Daniel, who writes obituaries for a newspaper. Rachel Redford captures the waifish appeal of Alice, who strips for men in a sleazy but expensive club and can switch abruptly from streetwise toughness to moist-eyed innocence.

All these characters weave fictions about themselves. Each is intriguingly self-contradictory, capable of cruelty and charm. But the chemistry isn’t convincing. There’s also a lack of atmosphere, though this is arguably an attempt to suggest these people are trapped in their bleak selfishness and are products of an empty society.

The most absorbing scene is the one that should seem most dated. Daniel pretends to be a woman in an internet chatroom and grabs the attention of Larry, whom he thrills with a torrent of filth. This is funny, creepy and intimate. But only Sewell consistently invests the production with a sense of danger.

Still, Marber writes perceptively about our obsession with appearances, the perils of honesty, and the damage we can do to others in the name of love. At its best his dialogue remains wickedly sharp.


Hmm, this chemistry complain again!

www.whatsonstage.com/london-theatre/reviews/closer-donmar-warehouse-review_37220.html

Closer (Donmar Warehouse) - 'red-blooded revival'
By Matt Trueman

It was the internet's stage debut. In 1997, two men sat at computers on opposite sides of the Cottesloe stage, and had cyber-sex - one of them masquerading as a woman: "dark hair, dirty mouth, epic tits."

Closer, the third play by Patrick Marber, suggested a new age had arrived; one in which identity was malleable, sex was everywhere and love - ha - was just another consumer choice. Tinder was still 15 years away; even Facebook, seven. But why settle down when millions of strangers remain unf***ed? Why settle for yourself when you could be anyone you want?

Closer is a fin de siècle play, entirely preoccupied with death. Its four Londoners are aghast at the prospect of aging. They could be the start of a bad joke: a dermatologist, an obituarist, a photographer and a stripper walk into a play. All of them circling around death, around sex, around surface appearances; circling around each other. They're seeking perfection. Happiness. Paradise on earth, in London - "a theme park," says one.

The four of them form two couples: Dan, obituarist, and Alice, stripper, meet at a car accident; Larry, doctor, and Anna, photographer, meet by the shark tank at London's new aquarium. Over four years, they swap - or steal - partners, then swap - or steal - them back; always wanting what they haven't got. Love becomes a battleground. "Have you ever seen a human heart?" spits Larry at Dan. "It's like a fist wrapped in blood."

That comes to the fore in David Leveaux's red-blooded revival, as two lascivious alpha males lock horns. Both are bundles of insecurity. Rufus Sewell, so drawn he's practically a skin-covered skull, is twitchy and snarling as Larry. Oliver Chris's Dan is a wet blanket hiding beneath a nasty, dry wit. Alice and Anna are territory to be fought over or property to be possessed, but Leveaux lets them off the hook in a way Marber never does.

The women are pretty much beatified here, almost entirely blameless - and it's a problem. Rachel Redford's Alice is first seen in a shaggy white coat - a lamb to Daniel Wolf's slaughter - while Nancy Carroll's Anna, older and exhausted, wears her meshed jumper like chain mail. Marber makes them equal partners in the plot, pulling the strings and exploiting the men: Alice strips, Anna cheats and both plot their partner swaps. Leveaux makes them somehow more acquiescent and so reduces their agency. We get two villains and two victims, not four people, all brittle and vicious and trying.

That's symptomatic of a production that's always too simple and often too stewed. It settles down eventually, but Leveaux's levels are off; the acting's too big for the Donmar. Sewell's borderline maniacal and Chris sighs off into middle-distance. At one point, Redford leaves a room and looks back, longingly, over her shoulder. It verges on soap - and neither Bunny Christie's hollow industrial-chic set nor sloppy, slushy Finn Ross projections help matters.

Marber's writing is never that. It's insistent, true, with death woven into almost every other line, but Closer's as well-made as a watch, stringent in its plotting and strident in its politics. Psychologically, it's extraordinary - both bruised and bruising - and well, well ahead of its time.

I think I have to place the Nancy Carroll-Rachel Redford interview here, it can work like a ripost. www.standard.co.uk/showbiz/celebrity-news/closer-star-nancy-carroll-i-love-that-this-play-celebrates-sexy-older-women-10067007.html


ADDED LATER
A new article with a new picture has arrived! And read it carefully, because GE2 is quoted in it!!!! Yes, the second tweet!



www.officiallondontheatre.co.uk/news/first-nights/article/item274020/closer/
by Kate Stanbury

What’s it all about?

Love, desire, sex, deceit, suffering and, perhaps surprisingly, some honesty play a part in Patrick Marber’s Olivier Award-winning play, which is back in London after more than 15 years.
The drama, which premiered at the National Theatre in 1997, charts the story of four individuals and their relationships with one another against the backdrop of London. They crave each other. They love each other. They reject each other. They swap each other. With so much immorality, infidelity and brutality, will any of them ever emerge happy from this precarious game of relationship roulette?

Who’s in it?
Olivier Award winner Nancy Carroll gives a flawless performance as photographer Anna. A heart-wrenching vulnerability is visible in her eyes as she faces the consequences of her infidelity but at the same time her punchy delivery of some of Marber’s wittiest lines provides the production’s funniest moments.
Taking to the Donmar Warehouse stage following recent appearances in Great Britain and King Charles III, Oliver Chris strikes a balance in the erratic behaviour of obituary writer and aspiring novelist Dan, tenderness turning to desperation as he longs for his love to be requited, but all too aware of his ability to annihilate the happiness of others.
The default position of Rufus Sewell’s Larry is awkward and jittery with a tinge of arrogance, until emotions take over and everything that is pent-up inside him is released in startling outbursts of rage.
Last seen on the London stage in the Royal Court’s Adler And Gibb, Rachel Redford is a spritely and gutsy Alice, the youngest and arguably most angst-ridden of the quartet, who hides her torment and weakness behind a plucky exterior.
What should I look out for?
Look out for some clever structuring, which sees two different scenarios, with two different sets of characters, being played out simultaneously, mirroring how the characters encroach on each other’s lives.

In a nutshell?
Olivier Award winner Nancy Carroll shines in David Leveaux’s highly anticipated revival of Patrick Marber’s groundbreaking 1997 play about sex, lust and betrayal.

What's being said on Twitter?
@jamestrentderby#dayseat Arrived @donmar @9:30am yesterday. First there, easily got a standing ticket. Closer is a must see production, outstanding cast!

@rufustherooftop Wonderful to see gorgeous #RufusSewell in 1st preview of @pmarber's #Closer last night. Funny, sad, emotional play, excellent cast. #donmar

Will I like it?
While Marber’s exploration of love and sex in London may not shock as it once did a decade or so ago, there is still plenty to like about David Leveaux’s well-judged revival. For one, Carroll’s exceptional performance proves her to be an actress more than worthy of her 2011 Olivier Award win. Then there’s Bunny Christie’s striking designs, which like her work on West End hit The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time, combine Finn Ross’ equally spectacular video projections. And, of course, there’s the play itself, which is undoubtedly an incredible revival-worthy piece of writing.

Just one more thing, prudes beware! With casual use of the ‘c’ word and a crude – albeit hilarious – cyber-sex scene, references get far more explicit than “A friendly poke”.

[kissmekate]

I haven't got the time to read them all now, but I love this picture!

[midoro]

Thanks Ladies for the reviews and gorgeous pics!

[BuildersPassion]

Thanks for posting! I read every single article and review on my way home on the train . 

[nell]

Thanks for all the reviews and lovely pics Adina . Rufus is getting some very well deserved praise in every review I've read

I've moved the on stage pics to here rufussewell.proboards.com/thread/2740/rufus-stage-closer-patrick-marber?page=8

[Rachel]

Glad to see Rufus getting the praise he deserves. And how cool -.was that a tweet by a Rooftopper that was included in that last review posted?

[rueful]

Adina! I loved reading all the reviews!  Fantastic! I mean, a few of them were not fantastic, but I like that almost all reviews of Rufus's performance are excellent.
I find it hilarious that one reviewer claimed he was "too subtle to be convincing" while another complains Nancy Carroll's colleagues were "less nuanced".  Which one is it, silly reviewers!!

Feb 24, 2015 13:36:23 GMT adina said:

Oh, the wonderful picture that GE2 posted from The Guardian article is quite big, so click on its link: i.guim.co.uk/static/w-1920/h--/q-95/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2015/2/23/1424706171628/0879c1a8-2e9c-47c4-8151-a4b9ae81d8ac-2060x1236.jpeg
This must be the divorce papers scene - hah, what a facial expression!!! Bitterness à la Rufus.

Yes, if looks could kill....

Feb 24, 2015 13:36:23 GMT adina said:

And read it carefully, because GE2 is quoted in it!!!! Yes, the second tweet!

It was only a matter of time. 


Edited to add a couple more reviews.


www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/closer-donmar-warehouse-patrick-marbers-play-about-love-and-sex-still-wounds-10066697.html

Closer, Donmar Warehouse, review: Patrick Marber’s play about love and sex still wound

Holly Williams

It may be seventeen years since Closer premiered in London, but Patrick Marber’s four-hander about love, sex and relationships still has the power to wound. We meet, with almost coldly mathematical precision, two men and two women at key moments in their interlaced romances. Closer painfully strips back the skin to probe at how telling a lie, or confessing the truth, can be a kindness or a cruelty.

But it’s also still very funny: Marber’s famously explicit script is as good at delivering witty zingers and power-play banter (as it wouldn’t have been called back in 1997) as it is at the revelatory moments where people seem surprised at their own capacity to feel hurt, and to hurt others.

And while they admittedly have the sort of pithy insight and ability to articulate their emotions that only characters in a play ever could, a chemistry-rich cast ensure most of Marber’s dialogue lands.

(See Adina, someone saw chemistry.)

Oliver Chris manages the quick changes in confidence of aspiring-writer Dan, while Rufus Sewell has a pleasing belligerence and canny manipulative streak as the doctor Larry; both snort and sigh, gurn and groan under the pain of love.

Rachel Redford, if underpowered in the most vicious lovers’ tiffs, commendably manages to balance little-girl fragility with forthright self-possession. She makes the character that sails closest to groaning stereotype - Alice, the troubled, beautiful, quirky stripper - feel like a real woman rather than merely a sexy young “waif” (this is aided by Sewell playing the strip-club scene as a slurring, pitiable drunk - tilting an uneven power-balance back in Alice's favour). Finally, Nancy Carroll is predictably superb as Anna: every emotional shift fluttering subtly across her face. Humour, pity, anger, regret, lust… she crackles with it all.

There’s a lightness to David Leveaux’s production that means all the hook-ups, F***-ups and break-ups don’t leave the audience feeling too wrung-out. Meanwhile, a British wryness - notably absent in the Hollywoodised female cast of 2004’s film version - prevents the piled-up declarations of love from becoming precious.

The production is brought up to the present day - largely successfully, and largely through costume (whoever had final say on footwear rightly recognising that women in 2015 have wardrobes full of ankle boots). I was less convinced by the sometimes clunky scene-setting projections. The famous chatroom sex that Larry and Dan - pretending to be Anna - have is rendered in basic script on a green-tinged black background; this would have looked dated in the Nineties, let alone now.

Otherwise, Bunny Christie’s neutral, spare set - doing just enough to evoke the nice restaurants and posh sofas of these childless, professional Londoners - is elegantly reconfigurable. Overlapping scenes see characters stalking through each other’s lives, as they do through their jealous imaginations.

But placing the memorial plaques of Postman’s Park - where several encounters take place - along the back wall is a bold decision, essentially mounting a spoiler in full view... Then again, Marber often gives the audience more knowledge about the characters than they have about each other, so perhaps it simply serves as a constant gloomy reminder that deception can be there from the very start of a relationship.


www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c646f9be-bc10-11e4-b6ec-00144feab7de.html


Closer, Donmar Warehouse, London — review

Ian Shuttleworth

Patrick Marber’s 1997 play is revived with a stellar cast

At the end of one scene in Patrick Marber’s 1997 four-hander, stripper and self-described “waif” Alice exits in high dudgeon from an argument with photographer Anna. Each is now involved with the other’s ex, and not by mutual consent. It’s that kind of plot, which makes for a deal of emotional intensity, in this case anger. But as Rachel Redford strode along the vomitorium through the audience, her eyes were visibly full of tears. To go to such lengths for the few of us close enough to make out that detail suggests an impressive commitment to emotional truth on Redford’s part.

Closer is a play about the ambiguous values and consequences of those grand universal virtues, truth and love. But, ironically, Alice is the one character not cripplingly attached to veracity. Also, as it happens, Redford is the only actor who is not a sizeable name. Anna is played by Nancy Carroll, obituarist and aspiring novelist Dan by Oliver Chris, dermatologist Larry by Rufus Sewell. It is the kind of cast to give your eye-teeth for, and all four take David Leveaux’s direction with the skill and commitment one would expect. It’s just hard to make some of the moments ring true: Alice’s suppressed tears seem more credible than either Dan’s or Larry’s free-flowing ones at other points.

In many ways, however, this is a strength of Marber’s drama rather than a weakness. He alternates between naturalism and near-melodrama to make us question characters’ sincerity to themselves more than to anyone else, as they couple and decouple with each other, professing grand passions — and believing in them — when seemingly more often motivated simply by lust. Time and again, truth comes principally as an embarrassment or an obstacle; it may lead to clarity but never to happiness.

The play has not dated as I feared it might have: the notorious scene when Dan (pretending to be Anna) and Larry engage in pornographic messaging in an internet chatroom does not seem stale simply because they would now be doing it via a mobile phone app. Bunny Christie’s set is timeless as well as placeless, leaving us to focus entirely on the quartet and ponder Dan’s question: “What’s so great about the truth?”