Sexy debut for new venue

Love, lust and jealousy meet headlong when Apocalypse Theatre Company presents Patrick Marber’s thrilling and sexy Closer  from June 9-26 at the exciting new Darlinghurst performance space District 01.

Love, lust and jealousy meet headlong when Apocalypse Theatre Company presents Patrick Marber’s thrilling and sexy Closer  from June 9-26 at the exciting new Darlinghurst performance space District 01.

After premiering at London’s National Theatre in 1997, Marber’s Closer went on to win the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play as well as the New York Drama Critics’ Award. The play’s brutal love quadrangle was then adapted in a film by the critically-acclaimed Mike Nichols, starring Julia Roberts, Clive Owen, Natalie Portman and Jude Law.

Now, staged in Sydney’s most exciting new Arts Venue, District 01 on Oxford Street in Darlinghurst, Closer is presented to audiences without the usual dizzying distractions of commercial theatre.

Audiences enter from a small door from the street and descend into a large white room. From there, director and designer Dino Dimitriadis promises an experience that will be rawer, more intimate, more confronting, quite simply…closer.

“The dialogue of this play is taut and powerful,” said Dino.

“Each line seems drawn from those unspoken truths – the things we think in conversation but rarely dare to voice.

“I have also always been struck by Marber’s choices of his characters’ professions, all of which concern themselves with the veneer of human existence and not the core: Dan pens poignant tributes to lives he never knew; Anna sees the world through the filtering lens of a camera, Larry scratches the skin of his patients but never their psyche; Alice bares her body to guard her heart.

“And beyond the memorable dialogue and sexuality of the play, there is a raw nerve in Marber’s work that, in my opinion, surfaces best in live performance. I want the audience to feel this nerve so I decided to remove the play from a conventional theatre and transplant it into the electric space of District01.”

This production stars Cat Martin as Anna, Katrina Rautenberg as Alice, Tim Wardell as Dan and Michael Cullen as Larry.

The play opens on June 9. Bookings: www.moshtix.com.au.