Theatre review: Never Closer, Belvoir St Theatre

Never Closer, the first play by Sydney-based writer Grace Chapple, premiered in 2022 as part of 25A, a Belvoir program that aims to give exposure to emerging artists. It clearly impressed Belvoir’s creative director Eamon Flack, who writes in the play’s promotional material that ‘I haven’t seen anything so assured and accomplished in ages’.

It has now returned to Belvoir, this time in the main theatre. While one may justifiably be slightly cynical about promotional messaging that comes from the creative director of the theatre itself, it rapidly becomes clear why Flack has chosen to restage the play. It is a remarkable debut – tightly scripted to the point where one would struggle to identify a wasted line. 

The play opens in Northern Ireland in 1977, where five friends who have just graduated from high school are having one last binge before Niamh (Mable Li) leaves to study in London. The play then jumps forward 10 years to Christmas Eve 1987 where the school friends have reunited at the family house of Deirdre (Emma Diaz).

Jimmy (Raj Labade) has just confessed his feelings for Deirdre before Mary arrives (Ariadne Sgouros), announcing she is shortly to leave for New York, and Conor (Adam Sollis) drops by. It emerges that Conor, who dated Niamh before she left for London, has been sleeping with Deirdre – something of which Jimmy was blissfully unaware. It is also implied that Conor’s animosity towards the English has hardened and that he has been fraternising with members of the IRA.

So when Niamh arrives – seeing her erstwhile friends for the first time in a decade – with her English boyfriend Harry (Philip Lynch) in tow, the stage is set for pyrotechnics. 

The Northern Irish accent is hardly the easiest to pull off, but the cast throw themselves at it with gusto. The cast is uniformly excellent, but special recognition should go to Diaz, Li (who has to shift between the Irish accent in the first scene to the affectedly upper-class British accent she returns to Ireland with) and Lynch, whose Harry – a kind of gormless Hugh Grant figure – is the funniest thing in the play.

Read: Dance: momenta, Roslyn Packer Theatre

Although the set-up is comedic, the play is not just a comedy. In fact, its most impressive accomplishment is how effortlessly it shifts between registers. It is by turns funny, melancholic and chilling, without ever feel rushed or forced. It is a mark of its sophistication that while it hardly feels like 100 minutes while you’re watching it, you are left wondering how it managed to cover so much in so little time. 

Never Closer by Grace Chapple
Belvoir St Theatre
Director: Hannah Goodwin
Lighting Designer: Phoebe Pilcher
Set Designer: Grace Deacon
Costume Designer: Keerthi Subramanyam
Sound Designer and Composer: Alyx Dennison
Fight and Intimacy Director: Nigel Poulton
Voice Coach: Laura Farrell
Stage Manager: Luke McGettigan
Assistant Stage Manager Darcy Catto-Pitkin
Assistant Stage Manager Maddison Craven
Cast: Emma Diaz, Raj Labade, Mabel Li, Philip Lynch, Ariadne Sgouros, Adam Sollis

Never Closer will be performed until 16 June 2024.