Explicit expression of sexuality in art and literature goes back to ancient Greece and even before. That candor was repressed in later centuries and is now popping out through the cracks in the mosaic of mass culture. “Closer” is explicit with a vengeance because its 34-year-old author senses a state of emergency in human emotional and sexual relations. The four-letter words, the shocking locutions are seemingly wrenched from Patrick Marber’s four characters in their desperate attempts to seek true connection. The result is a powerful, darkly funny play about the cosmic collision between the sun of love and the comet of desire.
Anna (Natasha Richardson) is a photographer. Alice (Anna Friel) is a young woman who works in strip clubs. Dan (Rupert Graves) is a journalist who writes obituaries. Larry (Ciaran Hinds) is a doctor, a dermatologist. Their chance meetings result in a quadruple mating and unmating dance, a do-si-do that becomes a do-si-don’t. The four coalesce in every possible permutation (heterosexual), coming together with impassioned need, and then splitting up in violent spasms of rejection. The key element in pornography is the absence of love. What’s new about “Closer” is that it’s a play about love that’s fighting fiercely not to become pornography–or a play merely about lust, about appetite. In this struggle all four people become casualties of one kind or another.
But Marber, a former stand-up comedian, sees the absurdly funny, as well as the tragic side of his story. In a scene that became historic during the smash-hit London run, Larry and Dan sit at computers having a sex chat over the Internet, with Larry pretending to be a woman. As they click away, their hilariously scatological messages appear on a giant screen above the stage, culminating in a mighty cybergasm that pours out in a stream of keyboard characters–ampersands, asterisks, dollar signs, exclamation points. If Aristophanes had a Macintosh, he might have written this classic scene, the metaphor of emotional disconnection in a world of digital sex. Under Marber’s direction, his actors (truculent Hinds, vulnerable Friel, jealousy-racked Graves, self-absorbed Richardson) become affecting embodiments of a failure to love that is in the end a mystery, an affliction of the modern soul that sets the body on fire and leaves the spirit cold.
