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" Of the many four-letter obscenities in Patrick Marber's thrilling London love story for the Nineties, "love"' is undoubtedly the most brutal. Caustically funny and very moving, this intimate four-hander fulfils the promise of Marber's. debut play, Dealer's Choice. Closer concerns four people who come together, come apart, swap partners, hate and hurt each other. It sounds trite and, in some ways, it is. The language of love is the oldest, most devalued dramatic currency in the book. But Marber's play, which he also impressively directs, has a depth and a ruthless contemporary edge that makes you look at even the most cliched expression of affection with a fresh, sometimes startled eye. From slow beginnings, the play evolves into a fascinatingly intricate web. It starts in Bart's casualty unit, where Clive Owen's Dan, a knight in rather dull armour, has brought Liza Walker's elfin Alice after seeing her knocked down on Blackfriars Bridge. Dan writes obituaries, and is a would-be author in search of a subject. Alice is a young, pretty stripper whose vulnerable appearance belies a steely emotional absolutism. Dan moves in with Alice, writes a book about her, then falls for Sally Dexter's voluptuous photographer Anna while she's taking his publicity pics. Posing on the Internet as a sluttish, fantasy version of Anna, he unwittingly introduces her to Ciaran Hinds's Larry, a coarse but kindly doctor who coincidentally examined Alice in the first scene. Thus begins an intense and often savage quadrille of romance and betrayal. What distinguishes Marber's script is his unflinching depiction of the brutality of relationships. Sexual jealousy rears its head in ugly, graphic detail. Hinds's helplessly nice Larry resorts to cruelty and self-abasement when rejected. Dan and Anna are unmasked as cowardly liars. Only Alice remains honest, and she pays for it. Marber also hints that his characters' romantic betrayals are a symptom of inevitable compromise. This is pessimistic stuff but Closer is rarely sombre. The script is studded with dry, understated wit and moments of rare inspiration. The scene where Dan and Larry talk dirty on the Internet is a brilliant piece of comic staging. Humour aside, the play offers audiences four very talented, very attractive actors sparking off each other. The brittle brightness of Liza Walker contrasts beautifully with Sally Dexter's resonant sensuality. Clive Owen's offhand handsomeness is juxtaposed with Ciaran Hinds's graven solemnity. Marber's direction is spare and sensitive, drawing fine performances from all four. The various props of Vicki Mortimer's stylish set gradually stack up at the back of the stage, like bad memories. The brittle brightness of Liza Walker contrasts beautifully with Sally Dexter's resonant sensuality. Clive Owen's offhand handsomeness is juxtaposed with Ciaran Hinds's graven solemnity. Marber's direction is spare and sensitive, drawing fine performances from all four. The various props of Vicki Mortimer's stylish set gradually stack up at the back of the stage, like bad memories. My only major criticism is that Closer lacks the driving conviction of Dealer's Choice, which focused on blokes and their obsessions. Here, Marber gains scope but loses some narrative impetus. The dark psychological secrets confessed by the women sound less convincing than those of the men. That aside, this is an extraordinarily frank and funny play, written, directed and acted with real feeling." London Evening Standard

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"When my neighbour asked during the interval of Patrick Marber's new play whether I was enjoying the evening, I answered: "Sort of," and if he had repeated his question at the end my reply would have been just as hesitantly unenthusiastic. The setting is neatly intriguing, the placing of the scenes in various London locales gives the illusion of hurried lives busily led; the four performances are undoubtedly vivid and detailed; but the general effect is oddly unengaging. For all that Marber's characters involve themselves in the stormiest passions of love and need, betrayal, remorse, vengeful truth-telling and lies, the over-arching intention of the play stays out of sight. Many people find loving desirable but difficult ­ is that it? Or loving the same person for more than a year or two is gruelling work? Loving is hating ­ that could be it, perhaps. Or even, bearing the title in mind, that we are never so far away from someone as when we live together. None of these possible answers earns top points for originality, but a dramatist can play many a new tune on old strings, and Marber comes up with several good snatches. But at the end of the evening when everything, including death, has come their way, the feeling persists that nothing has actually happened at all. The rear wall of Vicki Mortimer's set is hung with memorial plaques and represents Postman's Park, Aldersgate, a corner of London that many of us will never have heard of. Here the artist G.F. Watts (painter of Hope, the doleful woman strumming a broken lyre) erected glazed Doulton tablets to commemorate people who lost their lives while saving others. When the play releases this information we guess that the site has not been idly chosen. Maybe the reference is to Daniel's behaviour, in rescuing a waif who has let herself be struck by a car on nearby Blackfriars Bridge, and who sacrifices his happiness (though not his life) thereafter. But it could equally refer to the elfin waif, Alice, whose enigmatic directness of response is one of the play's happier achievements. All four characters are in the body business. The unattractive Daniel writes obituaries for a newspaper, Anna photographs people while they are still alive, Larry is a doctor at Bart's specialising in skin complaints, Alice strips. They meet, love, need, betray and the rest of it over a period of four years, as though in all London only the four of them were available for amorous attack. Combat is how Marber presents personal relations and the quick, cool, tart, crisply phrased, unhesitating repartee expresses this partial view of the matter ably enough. His choice of what slopes of their range of feelings to settle upon, almost invariably when only two characters are present, supplies an interesting variety of venues, usually when the combatants find themselves in mid-flight between emotions. And yet, while the players create characters that could almost be real ­ directed by Marber himself ­ they are given too few of the qualities that make us want to take note of them. Liza Walker's elusive, father-seeking Alice gives an eye-catching, intriguing performance, and Ciaran Hinds's doctor finds the rueful comedy amid the pain. Sally Dexter shows us guilt, and Clive Owen is the chilled and chilling journo. Many lines, even some entire scenes, are the real thing. Sort of." The Times

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" Well, he's done it again. Two years ago Patrick Marber made one of the finest dramatic debuts in recent memory, with Dealer's Choice, his corrosively funny study of an all-male poker school. Now comes Closer. Second works are notoriously troublesome but this raw, wounding drama strikes me as being even better than his first. Though Marber's style and vision are his own, there are moments in this new piece which reminded me of both Pinter's Betrayal and David Hare's Skylight. What's amazing is that Closer can stand comparison with such magnificent plays. It is, however, necessary to enter a note of warning. Closer is a play about love, desire, sex, jealousy and guilt. There is no nudity, no simulated love-making, but the language is as violent and as graphic as you are likely to encounter outside the pages of a porn magazine. The obscenity is entirely justified. This is how people, or at least many people, talk when they are in the grip of the most powerful or destructive emotions, or when they are engaging in sexual fantasies. In Marber's script, the f-words and the c-words acquire an intensity I don't think it's pretentious to describe as poetic. The play, set in contemporary London, is a sexual quadrille. A journalist (in the obituaries department, ironically, as it turns out) meets a spunky young stripper and they fall in love. Then, after a hilarious and riotously pornographic scene of mistaken identity on the Internet, a male doctor and a female photographer meet and they too fall in love. And then love begins to curdle. The journalist and the photographer begin an affair and hurt their ex-partners grievously. Then the stripper and the doctor have an affair which has much more to do with mutual despair and the desire for revenge than it has to do with love. Then . . . but I won't go on. Not the least of this play's accomplishments is that you become desperate to know what is going to happen to its anguished, vulnerable characters next. What I love most about Marber's writing here is that he gets right down to what Yeats described as "the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart". Anyone who has loved and lost, anyone who has experienced infidelity or felt love die, will watch this play with stomach churning pangs of recognition. We might not have spoken as frankly as Marber's characters, but I suspect some of us will wish that we had. The writing seems to have been ripped straight from the gut. In contrast, the construction has great formal beauty, consisting of a series of duologues which gradually move the action forward, and occasionally back, in time. The sense of artistic control is formidable, and my only real complaint is that the play's structure seems a touch too neat for its subject matter. I have no complaints at all about Marber's bruising, deeply felt production, or the performances of Liza Walker, Clive Owen, Ciaran Hinds and Sally Dexter which all ring unerringly true. The scene when Walker desperately begs her unfaithful boyfriend to stay, the scene when Hinds, like a man picking at a scab, asks Dexter just what sex was like with her new lover, have a scorching intensity and emotional truth. I'd be astonished if there's a better new play this year." The Daily Telegraph