Closer
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Overview
The play focuses on the complex relationships, politics and morality of four people trading partners in search of love and lust. It uniquely blends elements of tragedy, comedy, and melodrama and challenges audience perceptions at every turn. Marber turns upside down romantic notions of love and sex uniting two people as one and pointedly challenges the idealistic notion that total honesty is the best way to preserve a relationship. As the four characters move in and out of relationships and expose their individual bleak takes on those relationships, the audience sees their self-delusions and their futile journey to find what they really desire in life. Marber's writing is noted for rapid dialogue with a staccato rhythm and intense exchanges that are at times abrasive and explicit in nature and are infused throughout with dark humor. This Student Edition comes complete with a full introduction, plot synopsis, commentary, discussion of the film version, bibliography and questions for study. It is the perfect edition for anyone studying the play at school or college.
Synopsis
In Closer, Patrick Marber has created a brilliant exploration into the brutal anatomy of modern romance, where a quartet of strangers meet, fall in love, and become caught up in a web of sexual desire and betrayal. Closer is being hailed as one of the best new plays of the nineties, and as the London Observer noted, it "has wired itself into the cultural vocabulary in a way that few plays have ever done."
NY Observer
In its cutting contemporary picture of sexual desire and emotional failure, CLOSER is a brilliantly unusual virtual reality that rings true. The best new play on Broadway.
Editorials
NY Magazine
CLOSER is a sad, savvy, often funny play that casts a steely, unblinking gaze at the world of relationships and lets you come to your own conclusions...CLOSER does not merely hold your attention; it burrows into you.Variety
...a brilliant and bracingly adult new play from London...bruising and beautiful, shatteringly funny and devastatingly sad. The play's dialogue has a raw emotionality rarely heard in art or life. It cuts like broken glass...full of bitter, intelligent, unvarnished truth.Newsweek Magazine
A powerful, darkly funny play about the cosmic collision between the sun of love and the comet of desire.NY Observer
In its cutting contemporary picture of sexual desire and emotional failure, CLOSER is a brilliantly unusual virtual reality that rings true. The best new play on Broadway.From the Publisher
"Love and sex are like politics: it's not what you say that matters, still less what you mean, but what you do. Patrick Marber understands this perfectly, and in Closer he has written one of the best plays of sexual politics in the language: it is right up there with Williams' Streetcar, Mamet's Oleanna, Albee's Virginia Woolf, Pinter's Old Times and Hare's Skylight."—The Sunday Times
"Patrick Marber's searing follow-up to Dealer's Choice establishes him as the leading playwright of his generation."— Independent on Sunday