Bella’s 29th birthday celebration is less a nice, cosy party than a cross between a wake and a war, and that’s not just because she’s throwing it in one of those slick London restaurants-cum-bars that make some of us yearn for the sort of caff that serves tea, bangers and beans. No, it’s partly because her dad is dying of a brain tumour in a hospital offstage, partly because most of her friends seem to be as quarrelsome as she is.
But this at least is dramatically to the good, because the author, Nina Raine, is particularly adroit at writing sharp, combative dialogue. Much of the time a verbal battle of the sexes ensues, with Charlotte Randle’s Bella and her brashest chum, Susannah Wise’s Sandy, ranged against Adam James’s Richard, who is her ex-lover, a successful barrister and, something that makes him vulnerable to their cheery gibes, an aspiring novelist.
The bottles of wine proliferate, along with the edgy emotions, and before long James’s Richard is arguing that it’s women who go in for locker room-style tittle-tattle, women who treat men like sex objects, women who are the chauvinist oppressors, women who lack romance and find love difficult. It’s none too convincing, because the speaker is suffering from sexual envy and anger and anyway doesn’t support his case with much that could be mistaken for argument. But it’s lively and funny — and, considering that the dramatist is a woman, a pretty shrewd attempt to penetrate the self-justifying and basically misogynistic male mind.
But another Closer this isn’t, quite. Patrick Marber’s play was better structured and, for all its surface cynicism, morally more incisive. Moreover, the flashbacks involving the sick father are too cursory to mean much. Yes, Hilton McRae’s Dad is clearly a difficult old bloke, apt to bang on Bella’s bedroom doors and shout about how much she’s costing him and, later, to refuse her when she begs him to have an operation for his cancer; but there’s little power and less depth in the relationship and, consequently, no special reason to believe Bella when she claims that his bad behaviour explains her hardness and resistance to marriage.
Still, Raine’s intelligence and talent are not in doubt. Nor is the quality of the cast that she herself has directed, and directed well. Both Randle and James are particularly effective at mixing aggression with defensiveness, but everybody else adds to the sum impression. The next time I see a gathering of smart young professionals loudly boozing and obnoxiously bantering in the West End, I’ll think of Rabbit.
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