Language
The language of Marber's play is brutal and sexually explicit. In scene three, where Dan and Larry are chatting on a sexual internet site, instant messaging, Marber uses crude and up-to-date terminology and dialogue that you would only see in an instant messaging conversation via the internet. In a review of the Broadway run in New York magazine, John Simon writes, "Marber tells his story in short, staccato scenes in which the unsaid talks as loudly as the said. The dialogue is almost entirely stichomythic, the occasional speech still not much longer than a few lines. There are frequent pauses, but not of the Pinteresque variety—more like skipped heartbeats...Closer does not merely hold your attention; it burrows into you." Dan is dismissive of simple words like "kind"—"Kind is dull; Kind will kill you." According to Matt Wolf, "the animalistic pulse of the play reflected in its often scabrous language."
Read more about this topic: Closer (play)
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Whether we regard the Women’s Liberation movement as a serious threat, a passing convulsion, or a fashionable idiocy, it is a movement that mounts an attack on practically everything that women value today and introduces the language and sentiments of political confrontation into the area of personal relationships.”
—Arianna Stassinopoulos (b. 1950)