After more than a quarter of a century, Patrick Marber’s Closer retains its power to shock its audience.

That was audibly apparent on this opening night, especially among audience members too young to have seen the original La Boite production in 2000, and who presumably hadn’t watched the 2004 film version either.

Their gasps continued throughout Marber’s excoriating examination of a London foursome’s intertwining obsessions conflating love and sex. Sometimes it was at the situations, sometimes the extreme expletives.

The reaction surprised me, because social mores have become a lot less rigid since then in many ways. And it wasn’t what I recall from attending a matinee of the Australian premiere production by Sydney Theatre Company in 1998 (starring Richard Roxburgh as protagonist Dan), nor at La Boite two years later. It’s an interesting difference given that upending of social codes and conduct in large part drives Marber’s arresting 1997 play.

Back then, it registered as confronting, but laughter at the casual caustic outrageousness was probably more prevalent, and there’s still plenty of that here. And not by accident – Marber started as a stand-up comedian and sketch writer. The text is quintessentially English, juxtaposing a veneer of polite niceness with basely savage denigration. What was the first stage depiction of internet chatroom sex still packs a punch.

It does seem a stretch though that the UK’s Evening Standard awarded Closer best comedy, because the humour is predominantly black. The Olivier Award for Best New Play and Time Out Award for Best West End Play are a better fit. Marber was motivated by Steven Soderbergh’s Sex Lies and Videotape and his own personal experiences.

Kevin Spink and Anna McGahan in Closer. Photo © Stephen Henry

As the work’s catalyst, Alice is both lodestar and enigma. The young stripper is complicit in luring obituary writer Dan away from his partner Ruth, but it’s the outwardly respectable players (Dan, photographer Anna and dermatologist Larry) who continue to lie and cheat to service their own wants. Their sexual desire renders them morally rudderless. When they do resort to honesty, it’s weaponised.

And while a lot of brutal truths are served up by Dan, Anna and Larry too, Alice is the character who delivers the most profound insight – particularly about the delusion and myth of ‘falling’ in love.

Alice’s complexity and disarming mix of waif and worldliness also make her the play’s most beguiling creation. I’ve not seen Sophia Emberson-Bain before, but she is the standout here. Her performance is spot-on.

Kevin Spink and Sophia Emberson-Bain in Closer. Photo © Stephen Henry

The other performers are all technically strong, and Colin Smith is excellent as Larry, a primarily reactive role spanning a gamut of emotional extremes and sadism.

I had difficulty though with lack of palpable chemistry between Kevin Spink as Dan and Anna McGahan (who made her professional debut here in 2011) as Anna. Their connection needs to be electric for us to buy the pain they’re willing to go through and inflict to be together. The dark edge that drives Dan isn’t present either. As a result, the intensity is only searing in moments rather than the whole experience branding itself into one’s consciousness.

Some of that does come down to directorial choices, and in helming her first non-Australian work, La Boite artistic director Courtney Stewart has maximised the comedy but not fully extracted the nuance at the heart of Closer’s paradox.

Nonetheless, it’s a quality production, and Closer remains such a powerful piece of theatre that it demands to be seen.

Closer plays at La Boite’s Roundhouse Theatre until 20 April.