Official/press reviews and articles

[midoro]

Thanks GE2 and Adina for the latest reviews!

[nell]

Quite a nice review in today's Observer

Closer could hardly have been more fashionable in 1997. Patrick Marber’s tale of two men and two women, brought together by an escape from death, driven apart by the death of love, is not so much daisy chain as ring-a-ring-a-roses: it shows love as a fever and a plague spot. It became famous as a dating and a break-up play: people took their Significant O to it to tell them something. Watching it in the West End, I saw for the first time a couple snogging in the stalls.

I half-expected that its 90s chic would mean it would now look shabby. Not at all. The connections are still clever; the centre is more evident. This is so even in David Leveaux’s smooth but underpowered production, which lands all the exchanges on the safe side of savagery.

No one who saw Closer first time round will forget the bravura internet chatroom scene. On either side of a huge screen, two actors sit tapping away. One is a doctor, fending off his duty calls with one hand so that he has the other free for trouser work. The other is a languid manipulator, a bloke pretending to be a girl. The thrill of the internet pulsing into the life of stage may have diminished. The knickers talk – though fairly imaginative – is more familiar than it was. Yet it is still a stirring and more than ingenious scene: a graphic demonstration of an idea about human exchanges. The more frank the proclamation, the bigger the lie. Closer is about growing further apart.

Scenes that begin in mutual passion spiral within seconds into ferocious hate
Few plays have managed so persuasively to show – rather than simply talk eloquently about – falling in and out of love. Few plays have given such fizz to the disappearance of love. Scenes that begin in mutual passion spiral within seconds into ferocious hate. Marber makes it look inevitable. It is only afterwards that you realise the fineness of the triggers, the extent of the distance from beginning to end of a scene.

Oliver Chris is low-key hangdog as a defeated author. Rachel Redford, though appealing, never has the lethal innocence that made the character into a latterday Lulu (Wedekind, not Shout!). But Nancy Carroll marvellously makes manipulation look like candour. And it would be hard to better Rufus Sewell as the doctor son of a taxi driver who, as he dips in and out of the NHS, looks like a political summary of the period. His accent slides from crisp to flat-vowelled, his face fills out with smugness, and puckers with malevolence. Marber writes him both as dislikable and really present.

• Closer is at the Donmar Warehouse, London until 4 April

I don't quite get the flat vowelled bit maybe that's another way of saying slurring drunk.....Oh and Larry is never dislikeable IMHO


www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/mar/01/closer-patrick-marber-rufus-sewell-observer-review

[kygal]

Thanks Nell.

[walt]

for finding an posting, Nell!

[rueful]

Nice review, Nell! Thanks for posting it.

Maybe by the accent the writer meant he was going back and forth between two social classes: "son of a taxi driver" and "doctor"?

[GreenEyesToo]

Very nice review - thanks, Nell! I don't get the "flat-vowelled" bit, either. Even when doing the drunk scene, his accent didn't change, it was just slurred.

[GreenEyesToo]

Ooops!

Rufus Sewell's turn in Closer embarrasses the audience


blogs.spectator.co.uk/culturehousedaily/2015/03/rufus-sewells-turn-in-closer-embarrasses-audience/

One person doth not an audience make.....

[GreenEyesToo]

Just found this:

Closer | Donmar Warehouse

March 4th 2015

Until 4th April
Donmar Warehouse, 41 Earlham Street

Patrick Marber's brilliant and shocking play about love, trust and betrayal first premiered in 1997. An instant hit, it attracted critical acclaim and was made into an Oscar-nominated film in 2004 by none other than Mike Nichols, a man who knew a thing or two about how to put the vagaries of romance on film. Now, it's back at the Donmar Warehouse in a new production by David Leveaux, who won (deserved) plaudits for his sensitive stagings of Stoppard's Arcadia and The Real Thing. All was set for a triumphant revival – and yet some of the early reviews were lukewarm, even faintly hostile. There were murmurings that what had once seemed so daring and edgy the best part of two decades ago was now tame in a post-Fifty Shades era. How does Marber's play stand up?

The answer, thankfully, is superbly – so much so that one wonders if the naysayers saw a different version altogether. Although it attracted comparisons to Pinter (especially Betrayal) and Stoppard when it was first staged, a more accurate parallel is with Restoration comedy; the quick, witty and vicious scenes contain rapier-like one-liners that cut to the bone, even as its charismatic and attractive cast spar with one another to sensational effect. Anyone who has seen the film will be familiar with the simplicity of the plot - two men and two women undergo an intertwined series of relationships over several years – but watching the electrifying dynamics on the Donmar's intimate stage makes for quite an evening.

As Dan, the obituarist-cum-would-be-novelist, Oliver Chris again demonstrates the superb comic timing that made him such a scene-stealing joy in the first staging of One Man, Two Guvnors. It's an unfortunate facet of the play that Dan is compelled to behave in an illogical and sometimes despicable way; Chris's performance is charming and likeable enough to make some of his rasher actions seem out of character, but then this is partly the point. As Alice, the waif whose initial injury and rescue by Dan, the young actress Rachel Redford manages to erase memories of the film's Natalie Portman by being both needy and manipulative.

Yet the show is stolen by the two older actors in the ensemble. As the brutish dermatologist Larry, Rufus Sewell skilfully plays on the innate violence lurking beneath the façade of a civilised man who has bettered himself, meaning that his Act I confrontation with Nancy Carroll's Alice has a charge and threat to it that gives the audience a real jolt. And as for Carroll – the British Cate Blanchett, if you will – she makes the character of an unfulfilled photographer come alive in unexpected and hugely poignant ways, giving a real emotional drive to scenes that a lesser actor (dare we say Julia Roberts?) might simply choose to let drift past. Watching these four fine thespians is to see some of the best acting anywhere in London at the moment.

There are many other pleasures. The justly famous scene in which Dan tricks Larry into thinking that he is engaging in X-rated chat online is still hilarious, working far better on stage than it ever did on screen. Bunny Christie's design skilfully and economically conveys the play's many settings – an aquarium, a posh art gallery or a doctor's surgery, amongst others. And Leveaux's direction is pacy and assured. But it's Marber's dark, intelligent wit that you're likely to leave the theatre praising. At one point, Larry asks Dan 'Do you know what a human heart looks like? It looks like a fist, wrapped in blood.' The heart of this contemporary classic remains very much alive.

Reviewed by Alexander Larman, author of Blazing Star: The Life and Times of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

www.quintessentially.com/insider/closer-donmar-warehouse

[kissmekate]

Mar 4, 2015 12:12:22 GMT GreenEyesToo said:

One person doth not an audience make.....

Thank God! I just wonder why people don't read up on the play beforehand if they want to be sure that it's suitable for a romantic Valentine's Day outing.

Thanks for the last lovely review. I really wish I could see this one, too.

[walt]

Mar 4, 2015 16:56:52 GMT kissmekate said:

Mar 4, 2015 12:12:22 GMT GreenEyesToo said:

One person doth not an audience make.....

Thank God! I just wonder why people don't read up on the play beforehand if they want to be sure that it's suitable for a romantic Valentine's Day outing.

Thanks for the last lovely review. I really wish I could see this one, too.

I agree with you completely, KMK!

[kygal]

Thanks for the articles GE2.

[midoro]

Thanks for the latest reviews GE2!

[GreenEyesToo]

Here's the "Botticelli" review I quoted to Rufus (see the Rooftopper review thread), from The Spectator:


At the Donmar there’s a revival of Patrick Marber’s Closer, which is billed as a modern classic. It turns out to be just that. The near-perfect script follows the progress of four trendy London romantics as they cheat, romp and bed-hop with each other during the course of a couple of years. Marber’s comic set-pieces are as good as Monty Python. And his emotionally harrowing passages are a match for Pinter’s best play Betrayal, which is clearly the inspiration for this work.

David Leveaux’s production honours every excellence of the text and creates an uninterrupted stream of theatrical delights. A pin-drop silence gripped the audience from start to finish. Marber has that Chekhovian knack of making you feel not just that you know the people on stage but that you actually are them. How easily you could embrace their chic wit, their savage anger, their cool loaded dialogue and their harassed, bustling, lonely, morbid and sex-fixated lives. Rufus Sewell, looking like a Botticelli angel on crack, is brilliant as Larry, the low, jealous sexual predator. Oliver Chris, with his stooping frame and shambolic good looks, is deliciously fickle as the love god Dan, who only wants what he can’t get. And Nancy Carroll, as Anna, reaffirms her position as the most versatile and watchable stage actress in the business. Productions this classy are pretty rare. But don’t all rush for tickets. A larger venue beckons.

www.spectator.co.uk/arts/theatre/9460072/shaws-man-and-superman-at-the-lyttelton-reviewed-like-reading-a-billion-tweets-at-one-sitting/

These reviews are just getting better and better, aren't they?

[barbicanbelle]

Thanks GE2!
"Rufus Sewell, looking like a Botticelli angel on crack, is brilliant"
How memorable. Don't think I'll forget that!
Can't wait till Saturday - I've got tickets for the evening performance.

[walt]

for finding and posting, GE2!

I wonder what the reviewer meant by saying that a larger venue beckons....