Review: (Montreal) Closer

(photo by Joseph Ste. Marie)

Let’s get Closer
Marber play steams up MainLine Theatre

by Sarah Deshaies

What is Closer? A claustrophobic tale of four people ensnared in a web of love, deceit and infidelity in modern London. We observe four people, each with a different understanding of love, truth, and kindness: a failed writer, a spritely stripper, an entrepreneurial doctor, a photographer.

Dan meets Alice after a glance in the street bridges their interest; he’s bound to her once she’s hit by a taxi in the following moments. Our other two heroes, Larry and Anna, come across each other’s paths when wiley Dan sets them up through a cyber prank. Their four lives will collide in often unpleasant ways. 

First-Person: Andrew Zadel on Closer

Looking Closer

when a choice of a play should have been obvious

by Andrew Zadel

No matter how starkly obvious it seems to me now, the decision to mount Patrick Marber's Closer was not made overnight. I read dozens of scripts, as did Lydia Zadel, the co-artistic director of Chesterfield Productions, and Inka Malovic, a young Bosnian actress who trained at the Lee Strasberg Film and Theater Institute in New York. We made lists, had meetings, debated over spicy Thai food, made shorter lists, and had meetings in which previously shortened lists were made long again.