Find out what critics have had to say about this latest revival of Patrick Marber’s play as we round up the reviews…
The Guardian: ★★★ “Clare Lizzimore’s slick, intelligent revival, 25 years on, manages to bring its own sense of risk to the staging, yet exposes the limits of the play in the process.”
Time & Leisure: ★★★★ “There is searing power in this production. 25 years since Closer had its opening night at the National Theatre, it has remained painfully relevant, unflinching and brutally honest, and barring a social revolution, will probably remain so for at least another 25 years.”
The Telegraph: ★★★ “This superbly acted Lyric Hammersmith production gets bogged down due to some unwieldy directorial flourishes.”
Evening Standard: ★★★★ “Alice is the heart of the play, but she is also a fantasy conflation of waif, enigma and temptress. Here, Ella Hunt sashays brilliantly through the part in slip dresses, boots and chopped-bob wigs, by turns seductive, affecting and arresting. Nina Toussaint-White is nicely nuanced and restrained as Anna, Sam Troughton engagingly down to earth and then suddenly frightening as Larry. Jack Farthing is loathsome as Dan: trust Marber to make the writer the most unpleasant figure.”
The Reviews Hub: ★★★★★ “Clare Lizzimore’s direction is breathtaking. It’s a particularly inspired idea to run two separate scenes of encounter into one when Anna meets up with Larry to get him to sign their divorce papers, and is manoeuvred into sex divorcing Larry. In the original she subsequently meets up with her lover Dan who suspiciously demands details. Putting the two scenes together makes the relationships collide and explode in a whole new way.”
Broadway World: ★★★★★ “Closer doesn’t provide any easy answers or moralising. None of the members of this ménage-a-quatre come out in a better place and, even after a Bacchanalian orgy’s worth of sex, none seem happier for having ridden this caustic carousel. As a playwright, Marber never again had a hit like this one but the emotional power of this work, even after twenty-five years, shows that his legacy is intact.”
The Arts Desk: ★★★★ “Drama is writing in thin air, its content instantly spirited away into unreliable memory, so if a play is to be revived a quarter century on from its first run, it has to say something substantial about the human condition. Patrick Marber’s Closer does so because people are always balancing the need for love with the need for sex, dealing with the gnawing desire for someone just out of reach, wearily coping with the emotional baggage of lives lived badly.”
Time Out: ★★★★ “Marber’s play fizzes with one-liners that still shock, as well as twists that get genuine gasps from the audience. This beautifully-judged revival is a gauntlet thrown down to the next generation of playwrights: it’s time for an exploration of sex for the 21st century.”
The Stage: ★★★★ “Atmospheric revival of Patrick Marber’s play with a superb performance by Sam Troughton.”
Closer continues to play at the Lyric Hammersmith until 13 August.
