Setting the tone of what is to follow, Patrick Marber’s 1997 romantic tragedy Closer, now revived for the first time, begins with a cruel wound: a young woman called Alice is waiting in an A&E department with a badly gashed leg. She was knocked down by a cab driver and escorted to hospital by a passer-by, Dan, an assistant editor on a newspaper obituaries page, who dreams of writing a novel. Dismayed by NHS waiting times, Alice dragoons Larry, a passing dermatalogist, into examining her and, after his reassurance that the scarring shouldn’t be too deep, she and Dan fall in love over the blood stains.The dozen scenes cover four and a half years, with the shifts of date and – most crucially – dating established by dialogue and situation rather than projected scen