Marber Plays: 1: After Miss Julie; Closer; Dealer's Choice (Contemporary Dramatists)

In Dealer’s Choice, the first of the three plays in this outstanding collection, a bunch of stone gamblers and losers meet and play poker in the back room of the restaurant one of them owns. With one exception, they all know each other. The exception, Ash, knows the son of the restaurant owner. The son says Ash taught him how to gamble but if he did, he did a horrible job of it. The son is an inveterate loser, who plays hunches in place of odds and has fallen deeper and deeper into debt. The truth is he’s in the hole several thousand quid to Ash and some scary people up river from Ash are pressing for it. But the son has an answer to all his woes. lf his father lends him a couple thousand –it’s startup money, that’s all it is—he’ll put down a payment on an abandoned public toilet space in one of the worst sections of London and convert it into an upscale restaurant. Bob’s your uncle and the money will just flow in. There is a story line in this riveting play but it doesn’t develop linearly. Rather, it evolves out of the dialogue of these men, mostly about playing poker, poking out at places as the bantering of these feckless men goes on. Ray Winstone played one of the characters, a divorced cook, in its 1995 premiere in London. If you’ve admired Winstone in movies, you’ll recognize what kind of characters these are. They’re the kind that Ray Winstone would play.The second play, After Miss Julie, is a radical remake of Strindberg’s classic 1888 play, Miss Julie. Three characters, a cook and a chauffeur and Miss Julie, the spoiled and willful daughter of a wealthy English gentleman, country-estate style. The cook and the chauffeur are engaged, though not formally. Miss Julie has just been dumped by her fiancé who could no longer tolerate her abusing him. (She wants to be accepted and needs men’s desire but she needs to dominate men --she has a mammoth-sized Daddy issue-- and the fiancé refused to play S&M with her any longer.) She’s attracted by the chauffeur, and he by her, but more than that, she has to destroy any chance of happiness that exists between chauffeur and cook. And the chauffeur has to be seduced to her vision, not his own, even though she doesn’t have any clear picture of what will happen after she seduces him. What happens in that room, and in the bedroom nearby, is awful and what may happen to Miss Julie as the play ends may be worse.Closer was made into a movie, a quite good one, with an all-star cast (Natalie Portman and Julia Roberts, Clive Owen and Jude Law) and the script by Marber himself. Two men meet two women. They connect, break apart, almost connect again, can’t live connected and can’t tolerate their former partners connecting with anyone else. It’s a drama of intense dialogue, most of it just two people talking, a man and a woman, and the ending is …. exhaustion? an acceptance of what … less than happiness, more than aloneness. Love is a chimera in this play, which is cool on the surface, hot to the touch beneath. Don’t think love. Think possessiveness and momentary self-deception, because those seem more the emotions these lovers feel, both when they’re in a relationship and after it falls apart.All three plays are exceptional. Marber has a gift for teasing out the raw feelings that lie behind even casual conversation. There isn’t one person in any of these three plays I’d like to know personally but they are very real, and their issues and concerns are real too. Bravo, Patrick Marber!

The plays are undoubtedly excellent, and I enjoyed reading them. I decided to give three stars because what I received was a print-on-demand copy. The pages are bleached white and unpleasant to the eye. The covers are printed on low quality paper that curls up by itself.I understand that books that are not as popular have to rely on print-on-demand to even get to readers' hands, but I think it is misleading and borderline fraudulent to not mention that on the product page or reduce the price.

An impressive, finely crafted, pained and beautiful theatre text. Somehow Marber manages to synthesize high style and realism into brutal intimacy.

To be perfectly honest, I bought this book to read "Closer", after having seen the movie, which I loved. It was really intriguing to see a movie based on a play, as an avid theatre-goer. You can tell that the movie was based on a stage production, just because it relies almost entirely on text, as opposed to the other production elements. There are almost no blank spaces of silence in this movie! But that's not why I'm here...the play was every bit as raw and filthy as the movie. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Marbers other plays, Dealer's Choice and After Miss Julie, were of equal quality, and offered something surprisingly different from his other text (a rarity in today's theatre world). I do suggest reading the book front to back, to get a grasp of his style...the text is so readable (even for people who tend to read only prose).Dealer's Choice - This play follows several men who meet up to play poker every once in awhile. What should be a simple game between them holds such higher relevance, which we learn as the play progresses. As another reviewer posted before, Marber has mastered time flow with this piece. The characters are believable, and play off of each other with such ease.After Miss Julie - Being a youngun who hasn't even read the original "Miss Julie", I has reservations that I might not understand the characters or storyline at all in this one. I was proven wrong, of course, as this story of passion and greed jumps off the page and brings you right into the scene. The text is really vivid with this, and carries such an elegant theme to it, which makes the fall of this elegance so much more brutal and fun to read. I love the play on societal differences that this plot brings out, the dominant and the submissive. Very engaging.Closer - The character work in this is brilliant, as well as the pace. Marber has such remarkable ease with the character interactions, given such a complex and fast moving storyline. There is nothing unneccessary, but it moves along slowly enough for you to grasp every image, and idea. A couple of scenes that were excluded from the movie were a nice surprise, as well as a plot twist at the end that was only suggested in the movie, if that. Never before have I read a scene in a play and felt as though I should read it aloud. Doing so gave me shivers. Brilliant for actors looking for ruthless, energetic text that rolls off the tongue. Though the characters fall is shatttering and devastating, the play is beautiful and satisfying in the end.Overall, I completely recommend this text, for people just getting into playreading, or avid readers. Can't wait to see more of what Marber can bring to the table.

Fast service. Good product.

The item was described as very good, but (according to my experience of used items) I wouldn't say it looks very good. Acceptable though.