If you're looking for a pristine example of how Harold Pinter influenced later playwrights, Closer is it.

Closer is a play written by Patrick Marber, a man I consider to be a skilled manipulator of wit and raw, bloody emotion. The play takes the form of twelve scenes over the course of three and a half years. Not that you would know this watching the play, of course, as the script specifically states that no mention of the time lapses between scenes should ever be mentioned in the production. He chronicles the sexual relationships of four adults in London - an obituary writer, a doctor, a photographer and a woman with a, well, shall we say clouded history - she's a consummate liar, in other words.

Marber gives his audiences a huge amount of credit - he assumes that they can figure out what's going on for themselves without being coddled. It's also indicative of how the plot isn't really the point (though it certainly is important) - it's the dialogue that makes this play jump out and grab you, usually by the throat. It's razor-sharp and cuts that way, slicing straight to the heart of the matter without once stopping to look back. It is painfully close to the way real people talk to each other.

This is where that whole Pinter thing I mentioned before comes in. The dialogue is ambiguous and yet needle sharp. Pauses and beats are delineated with extreme precision, mimicking the hesitant quality of natural speech while still keeping things moving along at an incredibly rapid clip. Sudden outbursts of extreme verbal violence immediately follow moments of extreme tenderness and affection.

And yet, the play diverges from Pinter's works in important ways; the plot is obfuscated but still understandable. The dialog makes sense by itself without the audience craving all the bits Pinter would have cut to make his point. The violence is almost totally verbal, and any physical force doesn't even come close to Pinter's seemingly random brutality.

Marber's characters are certainly not to be loved; in fact all four of them are totally despicable. They lie to each other, they cheat, they're abusive and cruel and totally absorbed in themselves. They're human in other words, and regardless of the emotional turmoil they willingly throw themselves into they all strike a very particular chord in the viewer - each of them represents something about each and every one of us that can't be ignored regardless of how much we try to suppress it.

Closer makes the audience mildly uneasy while keeping them glued to their seats. I'd call that a dramatic success if ever I heard one.