Title: Plays 1
Subtitle: "After Miss Julie"; "Closer"; "Dealer's Choice"
Description: Dealer's Choice premiered at the Royal National Theatre, London, in 1995 and subsequently transferred to the West End. It won the 1995 Evening Standard Award for Best Comedy and, the Writers' Guild for Best West End Play. 'An exceptionally accomplished first play .though I know nothing about poker, I testify to the compulsive grip this play exerts and to the accumulation of meanings it ignites in your head.' Financial Times After Miss Julie relocates August Strindberg's Miss Julie (1888) to an English country house in July 1945. In this radical re-imagining of theatre's first 'naturalistic tragedy' the events of Strindberg's original are transposed to the night of the British Labour Party's 'landslide' election victory. Closer: 'Love and sex are like politics: it's not what you say that matters, still less what you mean, but what you do.Patrick Marber understands this perfectly, and in Closer he has written one of the best plays of sexual politics in the language: it is right up there with Williams' Streetcar, Mamet's Oleanna, Albee's Virginia Woolf, Pinter's Old Times and Hare's Skylight.' The Sunday Times. Bookseller