2000

What's on Stage

Thursday December 23, 1999

The Highs and Lows of British Theatre in 1999  (an excerpt)

by Richard Forrest

Was 1999 really an annus horribilis for British theatre? The doom and gloom merchants would have us believe so. As we ended the year there were dark mutterings in the popular press about the parlous state of the industry: of playhouses under threat, the dearth of quality new writing (signalled by the absent Evening Standard gong for Best New Drama), and of the bleak prognosis for regional rep proffered by the Theatres Trust.

For all the gloomy retrospection, though, there were a number of reasons to feel sanguine about the health of our stages as we looked back on the year. On many occasions theatre managed to overcome its reputation as the sick man of the entertainment business, and turn up some real gems...

Variety

Monday June 14, 1999

The Real Thing

by Matt Wolf

(DRAMA REVIVAL; DONMAR WAREHOUSE; 251 SEATS; 24 [pounds sterling] ($38.50) TOP)

LONDON A Donmar Warehouse presentation of a play in two acts by Tom Stoppard. Directed by David Leveaux. Sets and costumes, Vicki Mortimer; lighting, Mark Henderson; sound, John A. Leonard. Opened June 1, 1999. Reviewed June 10. Running time: 2 HOURS, 15 MIN.

Henry                    Stephen Dillane
Annie                    Jennifer Ehle
Charlotte               Sarah Woodward
Max                      Nigel Lindsay
Brodie                   Joshua Henderson
Billy                      Mark Bazeley
Debbie                  Caroline Hayes

Happiness is equilibrium," the playwright Henry (Stephen Dillane) -- ever-quick with a proverb -- tells his sexually awakened teenage daughter Debbie (Caroline Hayes) well into "The Real Thing," so perhaps it's one measure of the truthfulness of David Leveaux's revival of Tom Stoppard's 1982 play that its prevailing tone should be so sad.

That is in keeping with a play about disequilibrium-- about the mess and pain and hurt that accompany love, in contrast to more literary topics that, or so Henry argues, can be described in words in ways that love cannot. Henry is able to write a play about adultery called "House of Cards." But can he live with the direct effects of cuckoldry once the house of cards that Henry has carefully erected against emotion comes crashing down? That's the real subject of "The Real Thing," which is about one clever man's acquisition of "self-knowledge through pain" as he is forced to enact a situation he's previously been content merely to write about.

The play, of course, wouldn't be Stoppard if it didn't construct its own ceaselessly cunning house of cards, in a work that remains closely associated with Stoppard's own persona and life. (Felicity Kendal originated on the West End the role of Annie, the actress who puts an end to Henry's first marriage, and would prove hardly less central to Stoppard's own life.) And for all Henry's epigrammatic finesse, no one could deny then or now the heartache that came heaving into view once (as "Annie Get Your Gun" might phrase it) his defenses were down. For the first time, Stoppard seemed to be juxtaposing -- if ultimately to finish by merging -- the ways of head and heart in a play that is less about the invention of love than about the dislocation and threat of romantic loss.

Henry doesn't actually lose second wife Annie (Jennifer Ehle) during "The Real Thing," though he comes perilously close when she embarks upon an affair with her younger colleague, Billy (Mark Bazeley), in a Glasgow production of "Tis Pity She's a Whore." As Annie sees it, Henry must find sustenance in that part of himself where she does not exist, though it's among the many ironies of the play that the Annie of act one laments Henry's inability to feel jealous, only to be angered in the second act by that same demonstrative flaring of emotions she had wished for earlier on.

"The Real Thing" isn't just about the properties, however hurtful, of passion; it's a running commentary -- and an often hilarious one -- on the nature of writing and art and whether erudition and wit (Henry's trump cards, given his "joke reflex") are any more or less "real" than the untutored enthusiasms of the young Scottish political prisoner, Brodie (Joshua Henderson), whose cause Annie takes up. Brodie is talked about for most of the play but only brought onstage at the eleventh hour, to end up the butt of a visual joke that the Stoppard of "Arcadia" and "The Invention of Love" seems well beyond. Indeed, there's a perfunctory quality to the closing scenes of the play that don't honor the affective peak to which it builds, rather as if Stoppard were backing away from a degree of pain uncorked in Henry that surprises the very real dramatist of "The Real Thing" as much as it does his fictional alter ego (or not).

On Broadway in 1984 in Mike Nichols' justly lauded production, Jeremy Irons played Henry as the most suave of pugilist wordsmiths, parrying all comers and situations with a riposte. When he reached the now celebrated second-act set piece relating playwriting to the rules of cricket, Irons was primed to bat the entire show out of the playhouse, especially as abetted by fellow Tony-winner Glenn Close at her most effortlessly glowing.

Leveaux's current staging has an entirely different feel, as is made immediately clear from the muted, even antiseptic sets of Vicki Mortimer ("Closer"), featuring a sliding panel composed of blank-faced cards (and requiring one too many stagehands to shift props around). In place of Irons' bravura display, the gifted Dillane brings to the role a relaxed dishevelment and ease that lead to a poignant implosion during the aria of grief, "Please please please don't," with which Irons tore at the air.

In a lesser actor's hands, such understatement might sell the play short. But Dillane seems both smart enough to play a quipster who's not above accusing Bach of stealing from Procol Harum and humane enough to still the house during his quiet, incantatory repetition of "I love you" to the febrile flirt who will go on to be his bride.

In her first major London stage role, rising talent Ehle ("Pride and Prejudice") is clearly too young to play someone who regards newfound bedmate Billy as "my pupil," just as Sarah Woodward remains throughout a shade too brittle for the actress-wife Charlotte, whom Henry discards even as she nightly performs his "House of Cards." But in the first act in particular, her eyes moist with as yet unshed tears, Ehle makes a riveting mixture of anger, self-protectiveness and desire, beginning with the "touch me" that she suddenly and hauntingly blurts at Henry even as her soon-to be-jettisoned spouse Max (an excellent Nigel Lindsay, sounding intriguingly as if he is slipping down the class scale as his marital confidence is eroded) is helping Charlotte chop crudites in the kitchen.

What's on Stage

June 1999

The Real Thing

review by Richard Forrest

If there is one thing you learn from Tom Stoppard's 1982 play, The Real Thing, it's that accomplished intellectuals are a difficult bunch of buggers, and nigh on impossible to live with.

Take the protagonist, Henry, a celebrated playwright. He is a highly articulate literary acrobat, with a serrated edge to his wit, but also a linguistic snob, who can't help but ride roughshod over those around him. So naturally he struggles when it comes to love (the 'real thing' of the title), and barely grasps what it is, until it is about to vanish before his eyes.

Henry's life comes to mirror his own art, a play with the prophetic title of 'House of Cards', which features a husband discovering his wife's infidelity. He dumps his long-suffering spouse Charlotte (Sarah Woodward) and pinches Max's wife Annie (Jennifer Ehle), though later finds that she's having an affair with a young actor named Billy (Mark Bazeley).

While Stoppard's play deals with many subjects (love, betrayal, public image versus private persona), it also functions as a masterclass in the art of play writing. This is especially true when Henry rubbishes the hackwork penned by Annie's 'pacifist hooligan' friend Brodie (Joshua Henderson) with a compelling analogy between good writing and a cricket bat.

Occasionally you feel The Real Thing has dated in the seventeen years since it was written. The lines about digital watches and anti-missile demos seem particularly anachronistic. What does still work, though, is the use of poppy '60s tunes ('You've Lost That Lovin Feeling', 'I'm a Believer') which echo around Vicki Mortimer's loft-style set at key moments in the play.

Stephen Dillane gives a finely nuanced performance as the playwright, at turns flippant and sensitive. Nigel Lindsay, as Max, ably communicates the pain of losing his spouse. And Ms Ehle, whom I find somewhat overrated as an actress, complements Mr. Dillane well under David Leveaux's direction.

The Times

Sunday June 6, 1999

The price of love

Many plays claim classic status, but Tom Stoppard's analysis of life, art and infidelity is The Real Thing, says JOHN PETER

Powerhouses do not come much smaller, nor much more powerful, than the Donmar Warehouse, and its latest production is right up to its highest and most impeccable standards.

Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing seems at first something of a teaser. A man is building a house of cards. For him, though, this is not a real thing but only a game, for it turns out that he is, by profession, an architect. Now the door bangs and the house of cards collapses, as if from a blast of reality: the architect's wife has arrived home from Switzerland, if that is where she had really been.

But in the next scene you realise that none of this is the real thing: what you have just seen was only a play within the play, called The House of Cards, and it is obviously about infidelity. In "real" life the woman who plays the wife (Sarah Woodward) is Charlotte, married to Henry, the author of the play (Stephen Dillane), and the man who plays the husband (Nigel Lindsay) is Max, Henry's best friend. In "real" life Max is married to another actress, Annie (Jennifer Ehle); and come Sunday the two theatrical couples relax tensely in Henry's house.

Few playwrights can equal Stoppard in dramatising the silent fissures within a marriage, or in marking out the inner no man's land where the intimate exasperations that come from habit change into the destructive impatience that comes from maladjustment. Here the tension is palpable but at first unclear.  Who is watching whom and why? Who is pretending not to be watching whom and why? Soon the crosscurrents of attention become identifiable, and the explosion that follows is, like all such explosions, painful, embarrassing, humiliating.  Stoppard's own play, too, is, among other things, about infidelity.

Henry's problem is that he has a searching but self-absorbed intelligence.  Everything interests him, but he garners knowledge, experience and ideas, bee-like, for later use. You sense that to be watched by Henry is to be examined and left naked: for him, the exciting thing is not what you are but what you signify. Until, that is, he finds Annie. Dillane plays him as a lean, spare, watchful animal, eyes glinting: an endangered species, both hunter and hunted. There is something in Dillane's body that warns you, "this far and no further", while his face and eyes plead to be taken as he is and to be known completely - or as completely as is compatible with his own safety. Charlotte lives in a clearer, simpler, less fearful world, one in which emotions, though troublesome, can be told to behave themselves. She knows that she married trouble; and Woodward gives a cool, self-denying account of a life uncrowded with inner incidents.

Ehle's performance is the most luminous, the most sensitive, the most intelligent and deeply observed of her career. She understands that Annie is the most mature of this quartet, and therefore has the most to lose. Her body moves, at first, as if repressing something and anxious that this should not be observed. It is an English woman's body, voluptuous but diffident, with a sense of dignity and apprehension. Later, in the air of freedom called love, this body relaxes, subtly, quietly, but joyously. This is acting of a very high order: the actress's technique is completely absorbed in a sense of warm, unostentatious life. It is clear from the start that, in any relationship with Henry, Annie will have to be the protector, the kindly one, the sustainer. Max, her husband, also lives in a simpler world, and Lindsay pinpoints precisely the troubled core of a man who is not nearly as resilient as he thinks.

The first two scenes are full of surprises, for both characters and audience.  Stoppard is a master of the moment when a single phrase, its tip poisoned with wit, reverses a situation or causes a person's belief to collapse like a house of cards. But he is much more than a psychological showman, and his revelations, which should be the envy of the most sophisticated technicians of the theatre, are not mere fire works. The coup de theatre is also a moment of desolation and pain. Such moments are at the heart of Stoppard's play and they trap you in its central dilemmas. Is there anything you can believe in;  anything rock solid, the real thing? In any case, what is more real: your own life, the life of these theatre professionals who are Stoppard's characters, or the life of the characters they create when they are working? The system of relativities called life enmeshes you in its net of dangers and possibilities.  Do you love somebody because you are in love with them? Or is being in love the sum total of loving?

One of Stoppard's points is that art has the same imperatives, uncertainties and relativities. This is not because his central character is a writer:  Stoppard is not in the post-Romantic business of writing about the dilemmas of an artist as representative Man. No, it is because he knows that experiencing art is as real as experiencing love, weather conditions or career problems.  Writing plays and acting in them pays the mortgage, and involves your inner life in thrilling and invidious ways. Art, like love, is a question of quality, not just commitment. For example, Annie wants to help Brodie, a young Scotsman (Joshua Henderson) who was arrested for having set fire to a wreath at the Cenotaph, either as a political gesture or to impress her. Either way, he has written a dreadful, cliche-soaked play about a belligerent young Scotsman spouting slogans about oppression. Of course, Henry observes, Brodie can't write. But will his play be better if Henry touches it up a bit? It will not be the same play: but does that solve the question of commitment, quality and values? What are the values in writing, and who adjudicates? Do you write because you are a writer, or are you a writer because writing is what you do?  Which is the real thing?

This is a big play, big with ideas and passions. It is also a great play.  Written 15 years ago, it re-emerges in David Leveaux's masterfully structured, hauntingly sensitive production as a classic, increasing its stature as time endows it with greater and greater resonance. Stoppard's writing glows and prickles with intelligence, but it is intelligence with a heart. The dialogue glitters with a ruthless, dangerous, punctilious wit; underneath, a sense of hurt and heartbreak gathers and swells. The more sparkling the wit, the greater the desolation: in this sense, Stoppard's style is a function of pain. He has no equal today as the cartographer of loss and a sense of inner betrayal. Henry says that writers are not sacred but words are; I think he knows, too, that marriage is not sacred but love is. Love is Arcadia; you too have been there, and when it is tarnished the loss is unbearable.

The Times

Thursday June 3, 1999

Mess, pain and love with jokes

Tom Stoppard at his best: Benedict Nightingale relishes an overdue revival of The Real Thing at the Donmar.

UNTIL his Real Thing hit London in 1982 Tom Stoppard could be categorised as an intellectual trapezist, a metaphysical clown, a juggler with words - a very funny, clever fellow. You could not imagine his people raging, howling, or even hurting. Their dark nights of the soul never amounted to more than a rueful tristesse.

Then came The Real Thing, to be followed at regrettably long distances by Arcadia and The Invention of Love; and it was increasingly clear that Tom had a heart as well as a head and was prepared to expose it. And that's justification enough for the play's first major production in 17 years.

How does David Leveaux's revival reward the scrutiny? With Stephen Dillane as Henry, a dramatist seemingly as urbane as Stoppard himself, and Jennifer Ehle as Annie, the actress originally played by Felicity Kendal, the evening makes up in serious feeling what it lacks in energy. When they first show their love, or when their subsequent marriage is tested by her adultery, their bond's quiet intensity is unmissable.

The evening starts deceptively. A wife claims to be returning from Geneva to a husband who knows she has been with her lover. The exchanges seem vintage Stoppard: "Franc doing well?", "Frank who?", "The Swiss franc." But this is an extract from Henry's latest West End success, and the point of The Real Thing itself is to repudiate its blandness. When Annie admits her affair with Henry to her first husband, and later, when she makes her parallel confession to Henry, the men's reaction is far from urbane: it's an abject "don't, please don't".

Don't run away with the notion that The Real Thing is wholly sombre. It contains lines as comical as any Stoppard has written. And don't get the idea that it lacks his trademark curiosity and mental agility. You are invited to inspect its topics from shifting points of view. There are even extracts from Miss Julie and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, two plays about the perils of that commodity Henry defines as "mess, pain, self-abasement, loss of self-respect, nakedness" and his adolescent daughter as "colonisation": love.

There's also a sub-plot involving a soldier who has been gaoled for violently protesting against the Bomb. With Annie's encouragement he writes a a plodding, didactic play that Henry despises yet agrees to make actable in order to please her. This seems irrelevant, but isn't. Here, everywhere, the heart rather than the head finally determines the characters' behaviour. There is a "real thing", and it is feeling, caring and being vulnerable.

The Seattle Times

Sunday August 30, 1998

Romantic 'Firelight' is an original

by John Hartl

William Nicholson's "Firelight," which opened the 1998 Seattle International Film Festival and starts a regular run Friday, looks at first glance like the latest film adaptation of a 19th-century novel.

Reminiscent of "Jane Eyre" and other Gothic romances, it stars Sophie Marceau as a single Swiss governess who is paid to have a baby by a married man (Stephen Dillane), agrees not to contact him or the child again, then finds herself unable to follow through.

But Nicholson, who earned an Academy Award nomination for writing the 1993 movie adaptation of "Shadowlands" (which he created for television and then adapted for the stage), dreamed up the story and characters himself.

"I'm saturated in 19th-century novels," he said when he brought "Firelight" to the festival. "My major was English literature. I've got all the plots of 19th-century novels flowing through my veins."

He began with a mysterious image that is one of the first things we see in the film: "A woman comes into a room. What's she doing there?

"I always knew it would be a love story. The question was, what else would it be? I was a father at 41, and I thought I could utilize that."

After several false starts, including a discarded plot about a sexually frustrated vicar who tries to exorcise her, Nicholson came up with the final storyline.

"It takes quite a long time to build a plot, and the characters have to be people you care about," he said.

At first, Nicholson couldn't imagine who would fill these roles, and he could find no suitable stars in his home base, England.

"I knew I had to get the casting right and I kept meeting people who weren't right. Then I suddenly found myself with a green light."

Disney, which had approved the project, was ready to go. Nicholson, who makes his directing debut with "Firelight," was under the gun.

"Some of the English actresses who might have been appropriate were unavailable," he said. He decided he could adjust the part and give the character another nationality, and he looked at several European videos, including Marceau's French films, "Police" and "La Boom."

"Initially I didn't think Sophie was right," he said. "She was very modern, pouty and girlish in the French films. But she was available and interested, and I was completely amazed when I met her.

"She'd learned one scene by heart and it was immediately clear when she did it that she had the power for the role. She had recently had her first child and she liked the maternal theme in it.

"If it had not worked out, I simply would not have done the movie. She regards it as the best work she's done."

Nicholson saw Dillane in a British miniseries, "The Rector's Wife," and decided he should play the other central role. With some adjustments.

"There's a certain amount of gravitas about him, and I wanted more sexiness," said Nicholson. "I didn't want him to be an attractive but weak Englishman.

"He asked me, 'Are you by any chance trying to turn me into a romantic hero?' I think he could be a star, but it's a matter of whether he wants to be. He's an astonishingly good actor."

Nicholson knew his choice of cinematographer would be crucial, but he didn't necessarily want a veteran. He picked Nic Morris, who had done quite a bit of TV but had photographed only one other movie.

"I thought, 'This is my first gig as a director, so let's have everyone at the point where they're breaking through, so we're all on the same level.' Nic is a commercials director and he'd done second-unit photography on 'Alien 3,' and he shot a curious film set in Ireland ('Korea'). I could see he'd give it his all."

He is proud that "every penny is on the screen. No one is taking home big money here, but there are no deferrals. I will not ask people to work below par."

Just as the storyline of "Firelight" corresponds to Nicholson's experiences as a late-blooming father, "Shadowlands," which first appeared as a television drama in the mid-1980s, grew out of his wish to end his bachelorhood. It's based on the life of British writer C.S. Lewis and his late marriage to a woman who died of cancer.

"I was not at all interested in C.S. Lewis," said Nicholson. "My mother was taught by him and she didn't like him at all. She thought he was very misogynistic. So I didn't really have a picture of him outside of this negative one.

"'Shadowlands' is not a documentary about Lewis. He was in some ways a much less attractive person than the character I wrote. But I was very much unmarried at the time I was writing it, and I sort of found my way home. It was something I wanted to happen to me. I was involved with women but I did not want to commit."

He was also drawn to the sudden end of the marriage: "I wondered, 'What would happen if this meteor hit?' It does hurt, but it's worth it."

Of the three "Shadowlands," the stage version on London's West End is his favorite.

"They're all so different," he said. "I'm proud of the movie as well, and the TV version was very successful. It won every award there was."

Since completing "Firelight," he has finished a script about Nelson Mandela, "The Long Walk to Freedom," that he hopes will go into production soon. But he has no plans to direct it or any other films.

"I'm waiting for this one to run its course," he said. "I'm not in a hurry. Writing is what I do. Part of my hesitation is my family. They did not like it when I was directing.

"It was the most intensive thing I've done in my life. I'd come home but I wasn't there. You're running the movie in your head all the time."

The Arts Council of England

January 1998

Film Production Awards

Friday Productions Ltd - 'From A View To A Death'

The Guardian

Saturday January 3, 1998

Sex in a chilling climate Arts: Patrick Marber's play about the flip side of swinging London was an instant sensation. 

Lyn Gardner talks to the key players

The Making Of Closer

From the earliest previews of Closer, word began to spread that Patrick Marber had done what is generally considered impossible in the theatre: followed a successful, award-winning first play - Dealer's Choice - with a second that was even better.

Marber's modern love story about a quartet of young people who love, desire, betray and fuck each other against the backdrop of an anonymous London quickly became the hottest ticket in town. Under-40s in particular were hooked by the play's filmic, back-tracking style and saw in aspiring novelist Dan, photographer Anna, Dr Larry and the waif-like stripper Alice characters who reflected their own sexual anxieties and desires. Some performances have been punctuated as much by sobs as by laughter.

Closer also marked the theatre's first scene of cybersex, in which Dan impersonates a woman online to Larry, who believes he has met the dirty-talking fantasy woman of his dreams.

Critics compared Closer, which opened at the National's Cottesloe theatre in May before transferring to the larger Lyttelton, to Albee's Whose Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? Pinter's Betrayal and Hare's Skylight. `On the surface, Closer is urbane, witty, obscene, modern; beneath the skin, it is deeply felt, painful, sad and wise,' declared the Financial Times. Closer went on to win the Evening Standard Award for best comedy and the Time Out best play. It will undoubtedly win more awards.

Patrick Marber: In the summer of 1996, a bit of life happened to me. Romantic stuff, a series of events in my personal life. I had been beginning to think of writing a play and I thought, this is good stuff and I can use it.

Richard Eyre: After Dealer's Choice I asked Patrick to write a play for the Lyttelton, and what he said he wanted to write was a city comedy, a sort of Jonsonian comedy of our times. I remember talking it out with him and I could see it happening, the poster for it, the cast and so on. The only thing lacking was the writing.

Patrick Marber: I always start with the sound of someone's voice. An image, a line, and I'm off. The very first scene I wrote was the one set in the lap-dancing club between Alice and Larry which now opens Act 2. It came out of taking Dealer's Choice on tour to Atlanta the previous year. While we were there, the cast said they were going to a lap-dancing club and did I want to come? It's a very knowing, new lad thing to be interested in porn, but I'm not. But I was persuaded to go and the experience was akin to the very first time that I walked into a casino. A disturbing strangeness.

It was that I remembered when I started writing that scene and the rest of the play formed either side of it. At that time I thought the play was going to be about sex and power. I suppose it still is but it was much more political at that time, and I consider it a failure of the play that the politics dropped out of it as it went through drafts. Originally it was 180 pages; now it's 90.

Sally Dexter: I was asked if I would do a workshop on the play, though at the time I was very keen to keep out of the theatre and make myself available for film. Anyway, I thought Patrick wanted a blonde for the role of Anna. So I ended up with Mark Strong, Stephen Dillane and Kate Beckinsale at the National Theatre Studio, working on this play the size of a telephone directory. We'd rehearse it voicing objections, making comments, trying things out, and Patrick would come back each day with changes and new scenes. I had a very painful emotional upheaval in my own life at the time, and it was a cathartic experience to channel those feelings into the play. It seemed to fit a need that I had.

Patrick Marber: On some level, I believe that there is no such thing as an honest relationship. The best you can hope for is an honest relationship with yourself. One of the starting points of the play was that I hadn't, since the film Sex, Lies And Videotape, seen anything that put my generation's romantic concerns in any kind of perspective. I just wanted to see something that expressed the conversations that I was having - that people in their thirties were all exploring.

Mark Strong: I was doing Death Of A Salesman at the time, and it was going out on tour so I knew I couldn't be in the eventual production. But I was totally intrigued by it and Patrick's way of working. He seems to need the actors to help him visualise the characters. I always wondered how the thing was going to stand up when it got to production, because it's a bunch of four people reacting quite cerebrally. There are no obvious theatrical fireworks. It's very lean.

Patrick Marber: Sam Mendes was going to direct it, but as the first day of rehearsals drew nearer there was still no finished play. Also, he was going to have to do it back to back with Antony And Cleopatra and the Donmar was having problems at the time. So he pulled out, which was how I came to direct it, which was probably just as well because as soon as I'd written the first draft I realised that my working method is to write, cut and re-draft all the way through rehearsal. I even change it now. When you stop changing things, it's dead.

Liza Walker: I don't know how Patrick found me. I wasn't even in Spotlight {the actors' directory}. I just got a phone call saying, go and collect script from the National Theatre. I sat down to read it and I couldn't stop. I understood it immediately: I'd been through relationships like that. I thought it was really courageous, because it said all the things that people think but no one has the nerve to say. I went to read it for Patrick the next day, and the day after that I heard I'd got the part. Patrick was taking an enormous risk because I'd never been on stage before.

Patrick Marber: Casting the play is like running a dating agency. You've got to cast four actors who are sexually compatible. Alice has got to see the point of Dan, and so has Anna, who's got to see the point of Larry. Because Sally had been Anna in the workshops, in the later drafts she was the face and voice of the character. I wrote for her. But with the others it was more difficult. Things which seem incredibly important when you are writing become less important when you're casting it.

For a long time the play was untitled. The reason I eventually decided to call it Closer rather than, say, Love, Sex And Other Miseries was that I didn't want to close down the options for the audience about what it was about. For me, it was about identity, the city, death and the need to do something before you die. And the fact that the self who falls in and out of love may be a very different person from the one who walks the dog, goes to work and makes the tea.

Vicki Mortimer: I'd worked as a designer with Patrick before when he had directed Craig Raine's 1953 at the Almeida. He sent me an early draft of Closer. More drafts dropped through the letterbox. I read a classic with confidence, but I'm rubbish at reading new plays. So much new writing is televisual. But there was something about Closer which got to me. The writing is very heightened and Patrick is extraordinarily assiduous about the way he structures - there are so many intricate cross-references and backwards and forwards glances. They all accumulate into a complete network.

I wanted to give it a London root, but most of all I felt it was crucial in the staging to make it clear that there are echoes beyond the given consequences of any scene. So, for example, though there is furniture it's not naturalistic, and the way it is moved to the back of the stage and stays there throughout makes it clear that everyone's regrets, words and actions remain - they are always there.

Patrick Marber: The ambiance of the play is my own life. It is almost all set within a mile of where I live in Smithfield. I used to walk my dog in Postman's Park, where the Watts Memorial Of Heroic Deeds is situated. I was also much influenced by Milan Kundera and the idea of the city as a place of coincidence and strangeness, a place where people aren't organically connected. There is also a lot of Jonathan Raban's Soft City in it.

Paddy Cunneen: Patrick told me he was doing a modern love story. Originally we decided that it didn't need composed music but popular reference points. Then Patrick was keen to have something more romantic. He felt it needed emotional drive. I think we were talking Elvis Costello. Then about two weeks into rehearsal I realised I really wanted to compose the music myself. Watching it in rehearsal, I began to realise the play was fundamentally about passion. My original idea was to do it using a soprano sax, which is moody and melancholic, but has a spiky energy too. But Patrick was insistent it should be a cello.

Simon Baker: It was a question of setting Paddy's music within the London landscape of the play. I went for a generic and quite aggressive sound - lots of taxi brakes, which I think for most people are really the sound of London. I melded that with Paddy's strings. It gives quite a hardcore edge, a sense of the anonymous city.

Patrick Marber: The idea of the disconnected city was continued in the Internet scene, the second scene I wrote. I think of it as a Twelfth Night `breeches scene' in reverse. Very Shakespearean. Originally I wrote it between a man and a woman, but then I realised I was missing a trick and could show undiluted male fantasy at work, get really plugged into their libidos. It gets more laughs than I anticipated. When I wrote it, I thought it was rather disturbing.

Emma B Lloyd: The first time we tried to run the Internet scene, it took the actors 40 minutes to type the dialogue. Patrick and I tried it later and got it down to 20, but of course that was still hopeless. In the end we had to get a special computer programme written with the whole script on the programme. So though it looks real, the actors are only pretending to type. How it works is that I watch them very carefully and when they touch the first key for a sentence I activate a quick key which makes the whole thing appear on the big screen above their heads. The entire scene now takes six minutes.

Liza Walker: The six-week rehearsal period seemed to go on for ever. I felt completely out of my depth. I didn't know what was going on. People kept saying, next week we're going to have the technical rehearsals, and I didn't know what a technical rehearsal was, let alone what to do or where to stand.

Emma B Lloyd: Liza learned in six weeks what most people take three years at drama school to learn.

Heather Leat: Patrick has very strong ideas about what the characters should wear. If the actor walks in wearing something he likes he wants the character to have it. He doesn't always understand that actors may be reluctant to give their clothes away. Liza wore a black leather coat to rehearsals and Patrick wanted her to wear it as Anna. But we said, she can't because it's hers. So we got one made up just like it. Of course Liza was easy in terms of costumes because she's perfect casting. The stuff she wears is the stuff Alice would wear.

Liza Walker: I think Patrick probably does think that I am Alice. I don't know whether that's a good or a bad thing. I do find it quite difficult to snap out of her.

Sally Dexter: This play makes you dig into your soul and that's why I don't want to do it eight times a week. When I'm on stage, it is genuinely upsetting. I can't divorce myself from it. It is hugely painful and enjoyable at the same time.

Mark Strong: In the more intimate Cottesloe it opened to silence. I think people felt brutalised. In the bigger Lyttelton they are more dispassionate and distanced, so they can laugh more.

Patrick Marber: It doesn't offend me when people describe it as a comedy. It starts as a romantic comedy with a classic Hollywood cute meet. I suppose it's an intimate comedy like Private Lives about people who can't live with each other but who can't live without each other either. It is a particular kind of dark, bleak fin de siecle comedy.

Liza Walker: I can't believe that I'm lucky enough to be in a play that everyone likes.

Patrick Marber: Writing this play was really difficult. But it has given me the confidence to think that maybe I'm a proper writer, as opposed to a comic trying his hand at play-writing.

Electronic Telegraph

Saturday February 15, 1997

The complete works from Branagh

Quentin Curtis on a full-length Hamlet graced with a host of powerful performances  (an excerpt)

The Independent

Sunday March 5, 1995

Fiennes proves the player's the thing  (an excerpt)

by Irving Wardle

UNVISITED by the playgoing public and not even listed in Mander and Mitchenson's The Theatres of London, the Hackney Empire is one of the city's hidden jewels. Pass through its narrow entrance corridors into the splendour of Frank Matcham's auditorium, an Italianate horseshoe loaded with gilded emblems of the imperial past, and you are back in the exuberant world of Edwardian theatre. It is the right setting for Ralph Fiennes's Hamlet.