By the way, how should its title be pronounced? The ambiguity is one of the incidental lures to revisit this intoxicating, moving, amazing play.
Marber was and is a master of theatre: this is his classic. Here is a modern tragicomedy in which men and women speak wittily, excitingly, painfully of sexual love, the internet, infidelity, jealousy, and heartbreak. And they speak in brilliantly urban prose whose intense rhythms are closely related to the diction of the plays of Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard. Perhaps now only those over forty remember This Life , but I testify it mattered to many of us. Closer has only four characters. Most of its scenes consist only of duets.
In much of the play, characters speak to each other in stichomythia: the tense alternation of one-liners that makes so striking an impression in ancient Greek drama, and which here often feels like long ralleys at Wimbledon. Alice, who describes herself as a waif, is also a lap-dancer. Dan, who meets her in the opening scene and whom she quickly chooses to love, is a journalist, writing obituaries. Larry is a medic who first meets them both in the course of that opening scene.
The plot moves with shocking speed. Dan, now living with Alice, quickly falls for Anna. They subsequently refer to Dan as Cupid. Yet no sooner has Anna married Larry than she leaves him for Dan. The characters here speak of oral sex, female and male orgasms, fetishism, which partner was on top in penetrative sex, lewd fantasies of orgies; but, though their frankness is itself a thrill, it's never merely sensationalistic.
The sexuality expressed by these people expresses much more than sex itself. As the story works its way, there are sequences when Alice, so impulsive, is as much an archetype of the femme fatale as Manon or Marguerite or Carmen or Lulu. The point of the femme fatale, as told in multiple novels and dramas most of them written in French in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries , is her power to degrade the man.
