Clint Dyer and Roy Williams complete their trilogy with Death of England: Closing Time. First, a confession: theQR hasn’t seen the first two installments. Thus the greatest compliment I can pay the production is my intention to remedy that oversight as soon as possible.
A compelling two-hander, Death of England: Closing Time plays out over the final few hours before chef Denise (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) and florist daughter-in-law Carly (Hayley Squires) hand over the keys to their shop to a buyer. If their current relationship borders on hostile, it becomes clear they were once close friends, and that more than a failed business partnership now lies between them.
Jo Martin was originally cast as Denise but withdrew due to poor health. With only a week’s rehearsals, Sharon Duncan-Brewster has gamely stepped in. To call her performance magnificent is to risk understatement. To embody such a richly complete persona with so little time is remarkable. The script in hand (expecting memorization after a week is absurd) didn’t slow her a jot. Indeed the most serious consequence seemed to be a couple of fluffed words, and such can strike even the most prepared actor. In a week or two she’ll be even better.
Partner in drama, Squires is similarly sensational, fully realising Carly’s ribald sassiness which proves both superpower, and super flaw. There’s nothing of the caricature to Squire’s performance, however, Carly is a blend of sinner and victim in varying measure. Every contact with Duncan-Brewster’s dignified, self-assured, no-nonsense matriarch, produces sparks, and a continual chance of a raging inferno.
Taking full advantage of The Dorfman Theatre’s flexibility, Dyer and Williams set their play in a remarkable round. A raised red cross acts as the stage, dominating the basement level, and a visceral totem of the play’s national fixation. However the boxed accoutrements of their trades are present off-stage, the two free to step down and amongst the audience to tend to them. The result is a sort of monumental informality which perfectly matches the play’s dynamic approach to weighty matters.
There’s no fourth wall to speak of, the two characters fully aware of the audience, making the case for their individual righteousness as much to us, as each other. It shades their arguments and tentative reconciliations with a touch of public trial. With such bold theatricality, Death of England: Closing Time risks a big fall if the audience doesn’t buy in. However, such fears are allayed within the first exchange, the acid-etched punch of first contact funny, cutting, and full of confidence.
Carly’s fateful opening monologue to the second act is a tour-de-force, as she re-enacts a drunken seminar given to a fateful hen party. “Five Rules of Keeping a Black Man” is excruciating, as it is funny, as it is telling. She unquestionably loved Delroy, would fight to the death for him, and still, he has the quality of the ‘other’. Filmed and placed online, it proves a defining crisis in both women’s lives.
There’s much to untangle in the drama which plays out, a microcosm of a needed national conversation bridging race, colonialism, cancel culture, and the meaning of family. Social media, the play avers, only heightens the stakes, magnifying errors with the misfortune to go viral. Making racially crass comedy on a hen night is never acceptable, but what hope for society if it lacks the power to forgive and educate?
However, Death of England: Closing Time is not a play about a single crisis, but an examination of who people are, what made them, and what they do with it all. Denise is incredibly talented, and rightly proud of her black heritage and culture. Yet, it’s to Carly, and not she, that her son opens his heart, spilling out his enduring grief for his deceased father. Carly grew up with a fiercely racist father and covered her growing admiration for Denise’s son with the most hideous language to avoid suspicion. Now she’s sleeping on the sofa, the same viral moment which led to her and Denise’s shop being boycotted, having deeply offended him.
There’s so much to juggle through Duncan-Brewster and Squires’s twisting, turning roller-coaster of a conversation it’s a marvel that no plot, subplot, theme or idea escapes a satisfactory conclusion. It’s a deeply personal fallout, but also an unforced and in-depth assessment part of our national conversation. It is also a play and not a dramatised chat, life is happening about them, the shop is closing, and their investments are gone.
Yet, Dyer and Williams point out, as the two women’s dream falls into ruins, where is Delroy? Standing by his mother or partner in life? No, he’s at a football match with best friend Michael – Carly’s brother – and more invested in the fate of Leyton Orient than anything else. Where are the righteous friends who castigated Denise for defending her ‘racist’ business partner? Certainly not showing up now the food business she so tirelessly built up has collapsed.
What drew the two women together constitutes the hope threaded through the play. Denise, always ready to call out and criticise the curse of colonialism, finds a ready ally in Carly. Duncan-Brewster shines when her turn to monologue a group scene arrives, revelling in memories of labelling the royal family “white colonialists” and ruining Michael – and Delroy’s – coronation party.
She also recalls Carly’s immediate solidarity. Her class and cultural consciousness won Denise’s heart, along with the younger woman’s willingness to listen, learn and evolve. If Carly can drop her instinctive defensiveness and continue to grow; if Denise can see her friend past a bad mistake, then maybe the future isn’t completely awful. Maybe there’s life for the country after closing time.
After all, when the debts come due, and the shutters come down, they – and we – only have each other to stand beside. Deep, bold, funny and fearless, Death of England: Closing Time makes for very good theatre indeed.
