Closer walk into life's dark areas

By GREG DIXON

The script says it, so they know they have to get it right. And as actors Luanne Gordon and Antony Starr rehearse a scene from English playwright Patrick Marber's Closer, they stop and start until both are sure when and where they should be.

It's not the careful honing of Closer's dialogue that's giving trouble, a week out from tonight's opening at Auckland's SiLo theatre, but the timing of clicks from a camera.

As Gordon's Anna takes photographs of Starr's Dan, Marber's script is very precise, entirely specific, on just when Anna's camera must snap.

And director Cameron Rhodes insists the clicks from the camera fit the rhythm of Marber's words.

"The writing is so good," Rhodes says, as rehearsals break for lunch. "A friend of mine, who is also a theatre director, said he thinks it's one of the best plays in the past decade and I can see why.

"The writing is so accurate, he has choreographed the writing with beats and pauses, a little bit like Harold Pinter. It works beautifully."

And it is also terribly funny. In the two scenes I watch being rehearsed, first between Gordon (The Strip) and Starr (Skin And Bone), and then Gordon and David Aston (from last year's Hamlet and the recent staging of Pinter's The Caretaker), this comedy-drama of four Londoners coupling and uncoupling is a riot of wit and one-liners.

But it is also rather bleak. As it interweaves the lives of a journalist (Starr), a stripper (Aidee Walker), a doctor (Aston) and a photographer (Gordon) - the thematic link between them is skin - it moves from love and sex into the pit of betrayal and destroyed relationships.

And the epithets become cynical and biting: "What's so great about the truth? The truth hurts people. Try lying for a change. It's the currency of the world ... Ever seen a human heart? It looks like a fist wrapped in blood."

Says Aston: "It's funny, but it has depth. It's not brittle. There is comedy on the surface but really it goes right to the depths of the most jealous you've ever felt. However, they're witty, erudite people who enjoy each other, who banter. But they have strong needs, strong wants."

"It has been described as being a little like Private Lives," adds Rhodes, "but it's a deeper play than Private Lives.

"These are appealing, attractive people and we kind of want to be like them when we watch the play.

"But it goes to the dark areas like Private Lives does, with that wit like Noel Coward. It's a Private Lives for now."

But it's no drawing room drama. This production is a modern multi-media affair, combining music, photography and high fashion with computer internet projection and texting.

Its dialogue is rich with four letter words, and one scene - for which Closer is famous - involves a cyberspace conversation in an internet porn chat room.

"It brings up primal things," Rhodes says. "I've referred to this when rehearsing this play, but go to any nightclub after 3 in the morning and watch what starts to happen. Men become very primal.

"Men are there wanting to score and the women are playing the games and the men become territorial. That is exactly what's going on in this play. There is a veneer of civilisation, then the gloves come off. It's what goes on at a basic level."

Closer is the London-born, Oxford-educated Marber's second play. It combines personal experience and his talent for writing comedy.

He is an interesting sort, as well as a careful script writer. He spent his early 20s writing an unpublished novel and gambling in Paris before trying stand-up comedy.

He appeared on the same bill as Steve Coogan and Eddie Izzard but in such company he looked more than a little average.

After this meeting with Coogan Marber moved towards writing more than performing. He helped to pen a spoof radio news show which led to him creating Coogan's most famous character, the self-obsessed and rather stupid sports reporter and talkshow host, Alan Partridge.

He has since collaborated with Coogan on five or six television comedies including the enormously funny Knowing Me, Knowing You.

His first play, Dealer's Choice, was about poker, a game which at one time was losing him as much as $30,000 in one night. Writing the play was apparently a form of exorcism, an attempt to purge his addiction to gambling.

But with 1997's Closer he became regarded as a serious playwright, which led to comparisons with Pinter. The play scooped five prestigious gongs, including the Olivier Award for best new play.

It has since been performed in more than 50 countries, including an Auckland Theatre Company production in 1999. And now a film version is on the way, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Jude Law, Clive Owen and Julia Roberts.

Its success comes down to recognition. Marber said his play provides a horrible reminder to some in its audience of what they have been through in the past, while others recognise what they are going through now, which is perhaps why the play polarises.

"No one has a wishy-washy reaction to it," Rhodes says. "It provokes a strong response."

"You can empathise with some of the characters," says Aston. "That's one of my credos about theatre, feeling empathy. If you don't feel anything, you switch off.

"There are moments in Closer when both the men break down, they're on the ground sobbing, they've completely lost it. This is why it's a great play, because he allows those men to feel desperate - and you know why they are."

Says Rhodes: "I describe it as a roller-coaster. Our sympathies change for these people. In that sense, they're complex. There's nothing black and white about them. "

On stage

* What: Closer, by Patrick Marber

* Where and when: SiLo Theatre, tonight-July 10