Well gays it’s a new academic year, and that means that things are different and also that they are the same – which is a key theme of this play! We’ve got a new website, which operates on many of the same principles as the old one, but has a different URL and is in several ways better. There is also a whole new catalogue of student theatre to watch, and a brand new student theatre company, STAAT (not to be confused with ST.ART), which has put on this play, Closer, written by Patrick Marber in 1997. It’s probably the best play you’ll see this semester, which is a bit depressing because it’s also the first (and because it’s very not gay).
I had the chance to interview the director, Aidan Monks, a few days ago. He describes STAAT as filling a gap in the theatre scene here: Mermaids doesn’t accept every proposal, and People You Know only do original plays, and people still want to do more theatre. So this would be something a little different from both; not student-written, but still ‘a little bit more modern, with a little bit more naturalism, relatability in terms of theme, in terms of character’, and with ‘the freedom not only to do it, but also to do it our way, at our own pace, without any kind of central planning – it’s really cooperative and communal, the process’.
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| ID: Piper Richardson as Anna making a square with her hands. Credit: Aadi Jain. |
Don’t let my complaints about the theatre scene at large detract from this production. I believe this is everything that almost every play in this town has been trying to be. It has very well-acted, persuasive characters, with whom and whose goals you sympathise despite their flaws, and who navigate and tear up their relationships and talk a lot about straight sex in snappy and amusing dialogue heavily laden with meaning. Aidan says it ‘obviously is not new for a student play, especially not here, to be about sex or to be talking about sex, but there’s something about the use of it in this play which is a little bit different. It’s that it’s not talking about sex for the sake of sex, or just the idea of young people in the world, our relationships with each other – it’s about competition and it’s about power, and it’s about the use of something as intimate as sex in order to get what you want, and get what you want from other people, and the consequences of that’. That is certainly true. I think from watching it that this is a play mainly concerned with truth and meaning: its characters all search for meaning, and it attacks meanings; the meanings of words, of actions, of emotions, and of sex.So the characters talk about sex to exploit the intimacy and meaning attached to it, associating it with love or truth in a generally self-destructive way. Normally I would use references to sex in plays to make silly jokes about gay sex, but I find all the sex stuff here completely sickening so I’m just going to be very unfunny about it throughout this review.
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| ID: Clara Curtis as Alice. Credit: Aidan Monks. |
It all starts with not-quite-truth: Dan recounting to Clara Curtis’ Alice how he took her to hospital after she walked in front of a taxi. She opportunistically looks in his bag and is charmed by how he has cut the crust off his sandwiches. She performs the part of a desirable woman for him, all self-confidence and teasing and shifts of her body towards the very stiff Dan. In the next scene their relationship is reversed. Alice is a double character. simultaneously projecting confidence, particularly in terms of sex, and urgently needing the same idealised love she tries to give out. She wears black lingerie, and in another scene a very nice green cardigan with fancy cabling all over, which as a knitter I honestly find much more sexually attractive. I think this character is probably the weakest in the script – I don’t really like the whole constructed mystery around her and her inevitable fate, and I think she’s a bit simplistic – but Clara makes her very persuasive and affecting. Aubrey plays Dan with a lot of range: he is very repressed at the start of the play, a ghoulish weirdo stalker creep in the middle (wearing a low-necked black top that I would describe as slutty), and then gets a moment of bliss just before the end where he cracks jokes and shows off his legs to the appreciative audience. His creepiness brings together the other two characters, Piper Richardson’s sardonic and unhappy Anna, with whom Dan decides he is passionately in love while she’s taking his photo, and Larry, who has e-sex with Dan pretending to be Anna in the most memorable scene of the play.
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| ID: Dylan Swain as Larry and Aubrey McCance as Dan having e-sex. Credit: Aidan Monks. |
Good-natured and enthusiastic Larry has a very strong sense of class difference from Dan and Anna, who he feels look down on him as stupid and his job as a dermatologist as boring – and he seeks excitement. I found Piper’s Anna to be the most interesting character. She’s withdrawn and seems disinterested in and dissatisfied with the men, but goes along with them – this is a play about men demanding sex from women and simply getting it – echoing Dan’s ideas about passionate love. She always tries to be the most mature person in the room, but she never seems to find surety, perhaps exemplified in her many (impressively quick) costume changes – she emptily states ‘I am well’ and at the end is the last character left on stage. As always with these plays you get the feeling that she would be much happier if she just hooked up with someone who wasn’t a man with weird straight ideas about sex and relationships, just as Dan might be happier if he hooked up with poor Harry – perhaps the tragedy of this play is that some people have to be straight.
The stage is the Barron, and it uses a raised stage and a little catwalk, so you can even see some of what’s going on if you’re not in the front row. Aidan says ‘the restriction in space [of the Barron] thematically works so well’ with the play’s ‘themes of intimacy and entrapment in relationships – No Exit did it really well last semester I thought’. The set design is simple but effective, creating the various locations of the play with the minimum necessary props and occasionally lighting (pretty blue-greens for the aquarium) – Willa Meloth’s lighting is minimal but extremely good throughout, including some meaningful fades to purple at the ends of scenes. There are usually only two people on stage at any given time, but the production is at its best at the times when these separate duologues, like so much else in the play, interlock and flow in and out of each other, donating each other meaning, such as at the end of the first half.
I asked Aidan what he wanted the audience to get out of this play. He said ‘The emotions are the most important part. I want people to be aware of the language as well. There’s so much cutting specificity in the way that Marber writes dialogue, and that’s why it’s such a minimal stage design – the words just need to fill the space – and I think if people can get that on a cerebral level, get that out of it, awesome. But just as an experience, I want people to laugh, I want people to feel like they want to leave at the halfway point, but not leave, and I want people to feel some sense of empathy for the characters, even though none of them are particularly good people, and that’s the complexity of it, and I really want that, mainly, otherwise what’s the point?’. That all worked for me – the dialogue was excellent and the acting very human and compelling. As I’m writing this, tickets are still available for the second night of Closer, and I think you’d be missing out if you didn’t get one. I know plenty of people are tired of plays about straight people talking about straight sex, but we’re not getting any queer plays so this is as good as it gets.
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