Review: DEATH OF ENGLAND: CLOSING TIME, National Theatre

An unapologetically bracing stab penetrating deep into our national consciousness, the first parts of what is now the Death of England tetralogy focused on male voices. Michael, whose father’s death forced him to confront his working-class English family’s grim legacy of racism - and Delroy, Michael’s Black best friend.

Death of England: Closing Time has a similar jagged edge. Both a sequel and a standalone piece this is self-consciously political theatre at its most courageous. Carly, Michael’s sister and Delroy’s lover spat and slalom over a St George's cross shaped stage with Delroy’s mother Denise. The two are business partners as well as family, solemnly packing away the final boxes of Denise’s West Indian café after they are forced to sell up.

The two are like tectonic plates, shifting and rubbing together. They lock and tension builds and hot magma flows underneath the surface. Could it be just a tremor about to shudder or is an earthquake about to send shockwaves ripping?

It treads similar themes to the previous offerings but the female lens gives it a fresh focus. Soon we discover why its closing time: a viral clip of Carly, drug-addled and trumpeting “five ways to keep your black man” on the back seat of a limousine on a hen night, has been doing the rounds on the internet.

Carly loves Delroy, but her father’s racist legacy lingers in her subconscious. The line between victim and perpetrator blurs in a maze of moral murkiness. Underneath Clint Dyer and Roy Williams’ writing and undulating lyricism lies a brutal temerity.

The personal drama springboards organically into wider bifurcating touchpoints. Food. Hair. Music. Men. We seem to see more through the eyes of a sister and her lover than we did when the men were talking.  

Potentially the most divisive fork in the road comes when Denise recounts watching the King’s coronation with Carly and Delroy. “They are a gangster family” she passionately declares, accent inflected with West Indian intonation, only to then echo her son’s democratic response, snapping into the characters of Carly and Delroy aided by Jackie Shemesh’s slick but unfussy lighting design. It is no coincidence that Carly and Delroy’s newborn daughter is called Meghan. Both a sly wink and a provocation.  

That narrative counterpoint richly balances the personal and the political, something mirrored in the two performances; Jo Martin’s pragmatic Denise puts the brattish Carly in her place with nothing more than a cocked eyebrow. Collected and precise, her timing is attuned to perfection. Haley Squires as Carly is more symphonic, prowling around unrestrained and charged with adrenaline, an east London Puck in an electric blue tracksuit.

Some of the script meanders in places but it finds its feet in the end. Arguably that is part of its freewheeling charm. It still packs an urgent punch regardless.

Since reviewing the production, Jo Martin has been indisposed. The role of Denise is now performed by Sharon Duncan-Brewster.

Death of England: Closing Time plays at The National Theatre until 11 November

Photo Credits: Feruza Afewerki

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