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David Eldridge’s National Theatre trilogy of plays about love and relationships featuring three different couples comes to a satisfying, um, end with Clive Owen as club DJ Alf and Saskia Reeves as teacher and writer Julie, together addressing Alf’s imminent death from cancer. As with its predecessors, Beginning and Middle, End is a closely observed, unshowy study of two people – from Eldridge’s native milieu of the working-class East End and Essex - struggling towards something.
Some of the many references to druggy rave culture feel a little forced in Rachel O’Riordan’s production, and when Julie talks about writing she starts to sound less like herself and more like Eldridge. Although the characters are given equal weight and dignity the gender politics are old skool – here’s a self-centred man in extremis tended by a capable, placating woman. But overall this is a gentle, sad, valedictory piece of work about life and death, happiness and class, performed and directed with great subtlety. And there’s a pleasing sense of completion and synergy within the wider context of End for those who care about such things.
All three plays take place over seven months to June 2016, before the Brexit vote, the first Trump presidency and the end of the old world order (which, in End, includes the closure of West Ham’s Upton Park stadium and the imminent demise of many of London’s superclubs). The trilogy is a core part of the legacy of Rufus Norris, who ran the National from 2015 until earlier this year: Norris made his directorial debut here with Eldridge’s play Market Boy in 2006 and End is his last programmed production. And the play brings both Owen and Reeves back to the stage after an absence of six years and brings them together for the first time since Stephen Poliakoff’s 1991 film Close My Eyes.
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For those with memories that long, it’s something of a shock to see Owen, for decades a strapping heartthrob, shambling around the stage in a Hammers hoodie, slack trackie bottoms and Nike sliders, hunched over a walking stick. Reeves, by contrast, is pert and vital in a peroxide urchin haircut, cinched blue frock and trainers, light years from the dowdy alcoholic Catherine Standish she plays in Apple TV’s Slow Horses.
The differences in their physicality reflect where the characters’ heads are at. Alf has struggled downstairs to the open-plan side-return conversion of their cosy Haringey home, with an announcement to make. He wants to refuse further treatment, say all he needs to say to Julie and their daughter Annabel, die alone in a hospice and be buried with his mum and dad back in Essex. He is plagued by regrets and even more by nostalgia, for great nights in Shoom or Cream, high on pills and coke and on his audience’s energy.
Julie meanwhile is looking forward, urging Alf to try experimental procedures and embrace what life he has left. Having made a name as a bestselling crime novelist, in the style of Martina Cole, she has plans for a new book: possibly something literary, possibly something about her and Alf, much to his chagrin. An old infidelity, the only previous disruption in their great, chemical-and-dance fuelled romance, rears its head. Their daughter is, like Beckett’s Godot, awaited, and her anticipated arrival prompts reflection. Not least on how two old ravers like them produced such a square child.
O’Riordan’s production depends on the chemistry of Reeves and Owen. The flashes of pique, exasperation and anger between Julie and Alf are underpinned by a mature and demonstrative affection. End features one of the more tender and delicate love scenes I’ve seen on stage, and also a gorgeous moment when Julie briefly loses herself in a club banger that Alf puts on the stereo, while searching for something to play at the funeral he claims he doesn’t want. The design by Gary McCann echoes the domestic interiors of Beginning and Middle, with shelves full of vinyl and novels, Hans Wegner chairs suggesting the characters’ upward social mobility, and a kitchen that produces real tea and frying bacon. Lovely stuff.
Until 17 Jan, nationaltheatre.org.uk.
