Productions

Four Londoners - obiturist Dan, stripper Alice, photographer Anna and dermatologist Larry - adrift in the anonymity of a big city meet by chance. They come together, fall apart, swap partners, love and hurt one other in an entangled web of sex and angst that spans years.

An elegantly written, unflinchingly honest exposé of the way people love and hate, told only through scenes of initial connection and destructive separation. Closer is a bleak analysis of sex, love, truth, betrayal and hypocrisy that proves how little separates modern urban life from primitive barbarism.

Please note, the play contains challenging themes and adult language. It is not suitable for under 16s.

5th-8th May 2010 at 7:30pm, matinee May 8th at 2pm
Churchill Theater, 33 Morningside Road
Tickets £9.00/£7.00
Booking information coming soon!


Cast:
Alice - Hilary Paterson
Dan - Andrew McKay
Larry - Jonathan McGarrity
Anna - Rhiannon King


Crew:
Stage Manager - Andy Ellis

Lighting Designer - J. Gordon Hughes
Sound Designer - Sean Campbell & Richard Graveling
Costume Design - Fiona Arnott
Properties - Gillian Burnett
Projection Effects - Gordon Craig
Set Photography - Jon Davey
Backstage Crew - Nigel Jarvis, Gillian Massie, Craig McFarlane & Amy Redman

General Manager - Ross Hope
Production Finance Manager - Susan Anderson
Publicity - Wendy Barrett & Kirsty Grant
Front of House Photographer - Howard Elwyn-Jones
Rehearsal Prompt - Fiona Arnott, Wendy Mathison, Natasha Stiven & Claire Wood


Wit has been entered in to the 2010 SCDA Full Length play competition. As an entrant, the production was adjudicated and provided with a written critique. Here it is:

Comments - Friday, May 7, 2010

The well-desinged basic set using platform, blocks, flown scenery and simple furniture allowed multiple settings in different areas and on different levels with minimum changes. Smooth efficient scene changes with little delay to the action. Subtle atmospheric lighting throughout with cues taken smoothly. Excellent choice of music adding to the atmosphere. Appropriate costume and quick costume changes. Technically excellent throughout, providing secure support to the performers.

An effective start - music and a silhouette against a screen, with a seductive tone set by the opening dialogue and the interplay between the characters, although there was a tendency for succeeding scenes to adopt the same tone and a rather leisurely pace. The distinction between casual flirting and out and out seduction wasn't sufficiently emphasised; a lighter touch with greater variation in pace, tone and pitch might have allowed the dialogue to dance and crackle more. Scene 3, played in near silence with accompanying dialogue on screen, together with excellently lit areas, was extremely effective, though successive scenes were again rather repetitive in delivery and pace. The change of tone and pitch in the Dan/Alice splitting up scene gave a crucial lift, and the succeeding 'over-lapping' scene involving all four characters really brought the production to life, with the first act coming to a powerful close.

The opening of Act 2 with subtle lighting and the use of smoke and mirrors was very effective creating an excellent stage picture - together with some riveting dancing! The lively and sparky scene between Alice and Anna was another high spot, followed by a well-handled encounter between Dan and Larry which was full of feeling - both characters sparked off each other to produce natural and believable playing. In the beautifully lit bedroom the characters hit the required lightness of delivery and built to a great climax, and the final scene was very expressive and impressive.

Throughout both Acts, movement and positioning was well choreographed with natural and motivate moves. Good team playing, with excellent concentration and good support for each other. The characters were well defined, but each perhaps needed to establish and impress his/her own identity over the piece; the tendency for the dialogue in the early stages to be rather regular in pace sometimes led characters to pick up each other's tone, which didn't help with differentiating the personalities.

Alice: generally lively and natural delivery, often with good variation; intense emotions and movements very well handled. Dan: a positive characterisation which perhaps needed more variation in delivery at times, but generally relaxed and expressive playing throughout. Larry: smoothly confident and very relaxed, with a lively and varied delivery and a light touch where required. Anna: positive and assured playing, with the more 'serious' aspects of the character handled very well.

Over the evening, the first act perhaps didn't really take off - perhaps the short scenes and clipped dialogue didn't help the production to catch fire, but in the second act the relatively longer scenes allowed greater development and interaction between the characters, while the emotional aspects were extremely well handled. Though the lighter elements didn't always come across, the serious aspects were sensitively expressed and ultimately this was a very credible production of a most challenging play.



May 7. 2010
Thom Dibdin
Annals of the Edinburgh Stage

* *
The Grads have brought a long-range focus to their brave and challenging new production of Patrick Marber’s Closer, which is up at the Church Hill Theatre until Saturday.

Frank, brutal and packed with a rarely-seen honesty about the intimate relationship between love and sex, the play provides a satisfying reflection of social morality in late 20th century London as it follows the affairs between four individuals over a period of years.

Under David Grimes’ direction the production succeeds in finding the overarching truth of Marber’s writing.

From the first meeting between backpacking young American Alice and older failing English journalist Dan, to their dramatic final encounter four years later, Grimes reveals movement and decay. Similarly, there is a resolution about photographer Anna and dermatologist Larry’s first and last encounters.

As Alice, Hillary Paterson brings a vital tension to the play’s opening scene as she rummages through Dan’s briefcase. There is a delicious sense of dread as Andrew McKay allows Dan to become entrapped by this beguiling character. She as young predator, he as her older prey.

Later, when Rhiannon King’s Anna is quietly taking photographs in an aquarium and Jonathan McGarrity’s Larry mistakes her for a woman he had a particularly dirty encounter with in an internet chatroom, there is again a spark of danger about his foolishness and her ice-cold exterior.

The trouble is that these are just isolated moments in first half which never, otherwise, finds any emotional depth. It takes the characters’ detachment to such an extreme that Larry and Dan’s internet sex-chat, played out completely on-screen, seems positively nuanced in relation to the flat dialogue in the rest of the encounters.

What should be spicy, edgy stuff, is as vanilla as the ice creams on sale during the interval. Which is something of a shame, as the dialogue bristles with potential as the characters circle and prowl around each other.

It does get more edgy in the second half, when Larry encounters Alice in the private room of a strip-club. And so it should, given Paterson’s constant gyrations in her underwear and McGarrity’s bluff, blustering attempts to get under her skin and make her admit who she really is.

Yet it is all surface. They never recapture that opening tension. You never believe, not for an instant, that they would go all the way, that Paterson is really about to take her clothes off or that McGarrity is going to break the no-contact rules of the club.

Closer is a big ask for an amateur company to stage – made even bigger by the echoes of the 2004 award-winning movie staring Julia Roberts, Jude Law, Natalie Portman and Clive Owen. And the Grads have given themselves every opportunity of pulling it off.

There’s none of the vocal hesitation which would kill the dialogue stone dead. The set is a brilliantly conceived piece of minimalism that works by suggesting place rather than recreating it. And the use of music is entirely appropriate.

It just seems that the company have mistaken the characters’ lack of depth when it comes to their relationships for a lack of depth to the characterisations. Paterson’s Alice apart, you never really believe that they are who they say they are. Which is the biggest irony of the whole evening



May 9, 2010
Alex Eades
Edinburgh Guide

***

If you believe in love at first sight, you never stop looking.

Closer is not a cheery, feel-good love story. Anything but. The first thing that pops into my head when thinking about this rather depressing story is The Blower’s Daughter, by the Irish singer/songwriter Damien Rice.

It was, if you recall, the song that was used in the trailer of the movie Closer back in 2005.

But there’s more to it than that. The whole story plays out like a Damien Rice album. There’s something raw, searching and quietly destructive about it. It is stripped of fantasy and parades the often tragic truth of the human heart. As Lenny says within the play “Have you ever seen a human heart? It’s a fist wrapped in blood”.

The play focuses on four Londoners and the relationships that they have with each other over a period of many years. They fall in love and fall apart. They search for love and happiness, dancing around each other creating a whirlwind of pain that damages everything in and around it.

Closer is a play that, done well, should cause you to look within yourself and examine your own soul. The beautifully crafted dialogue demands your attention and paints a brutally honest picture of the human condition.

Tonight’s production, whilst good in patches, doesn’t entirely succeed in delivering that emotional punch. This is mainly down to some inconsistent performances by the cast. Photographer Anna occasionally came across as being incredibly dull and empty, displaying very little personality at all. She was just a blank canvas. How she got two guys to fall in love with her is a mystery to me. Perhaps that was because one of those men, Dan, was very similar in that respect, displaying as much charm as a rotten potato. Very rarely did either of these performances captivate the audience.

On the plus side, Larry was fantastic. The performance was energised, powerful and, at times, he carried the play single handedly. But when he leaves things begin to flop and the play just hiccups along like a drunk baby. It can be entertaining, but has no serious focus.

The set looks fine and the music included is frequently a welcomed relief, but the play simply needs more than that. The play is the soul of the production and it needs love and direction. Tonight, like the characters within it, this soul was lost.