Never Closer (Belvoir) ★★★

Written by Grace Chapple. Belvoir St Theatre. 25 May – 16 Jun, 2024.

Grace Chapple’s debut play, Never Closer, is a shockingly assured first outing. Sharp characters, tight plotting and witty dialogue combine to deliver an almost watertight script. This production, transplanted from Belvoir’s smaller 25a programme, gets a bigger budget to play with and the result is a crowd pleaser.

It’s 1987 and five former school friends unexpectedly reunite in their Northern Ireland hometown on Christmas Eve. Naimh (Mabel Li) moved to London to study medicine and Mary (Ariadne Sgouros) is back from Belfast with news that she’s moving to America. They find Deirdre (Emma Diaz) and Jimmy (Raj Labade) unchanged, still living at their homes, their lives seemingly stuck in a rut and Conor (Adam Sollis), Naimh’s ex-boyfriend, spiralling down an all-too-familiar cycle of loss.

The play opens a decade earlier in 1977, showing the five friends having one last drunken gathering before Niamh moves away. Despite the protestations that they won’t just become “winter friends”, meeting during the obligatory Christmas trips home, the optimism feels hopelessly naive. It’s clear there’s an attraction between Deirdre and Jimmy that they both deny, and that the friendship between Deirdre and Niamh is the core of the group. Cut to 10 years later and things are shattered. Niamh hasn’t been home to visit in the intervening years, Deirdre is in a “situation-ship” with Conor and Jimmy is wondering where that last decade has gone. Oh, and Mary is a raging alcoholic.

Chapple’s script weaves the plot together in stages, balancing the personal dramas with the wider world these five characters live in. Set in the Troubles, they are all marked by the violence and tension around them, torn between their nationalism, religion and personal desire for freedom. It’s this dance between multiple motivations that Chapple excels at. Each character is clear and consistent and always moving toward their goals, even if that means moving away from each other. It’s a lovely balance of comedy, romance and drama that feels very familiar and human. 

Director Hannah Goodwin foregrounds the comedy (and onstage Sgouros once again emerges as the MVP of the show). Phoebe Pilcher’s lighting excels at giving scenes nuance. The repeated invocation of ghostly presence is beautifully realised. Strong, grounded performances from the whole ensemble add to make this flow like a polished machine.

But as I watched Never Closer I couldn’t shake a nagging question… Why?

Why are we telling an original story about sectarian violence in Ireland in the 1970s and 80s, in Sydney in the 2020s? Where is the verisimilitude in this? Like some of the accents, the basis of the story felt clichéd and second-hand. This feeling was only strengthened by some plot events that I won’t spoil, but were a bit too clearly signposted and predictable. The big dramatic event felt, well, boring.

It’s clear Grace Chapple has the makings of a formidable playwright. Structurally bullet-proof, funny and engaging – Never Closer feels like the work of a more seasoned writer. If this is the first word in her writing career, I can’t wait to hear what she has to say next.