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Clint Dyer and Roy Williams clearly fell in love with the world they created with 2020’s ‘Death of England’. A monologue about white racism written by two Black playwrights, in it Rafe Spall played Michael, a confused man scarred by his troubled upbringing, who ends up having an almighty falling out with his Black best friend Delroy.
‘The Death of England’ shared universe has grown since: next we heard from Delroy (‘Death of England: Delroy’) then both men (in the film ‘Death of England: Face to Face’). Finally, it’s the turn of the women: Michael’s sister and Delroy’s girlfriend Carly, and Delroy’s mum Denise.
Do you need to have watched the previous three installments to get what’s going on in ‘Death of England: Closing Time’, allegedly the final entry in the series? No, but it wouldn’t hurt. Certainly, if you saw the original it’s nifty to see how the staging and Ultz’s set mirrors it: a big, red cross catwalk like an England flag, with little glass cases lighting up to display props that illustrate the discussion.
Carly (Hayley Squires) has taken over the family flower business, and Denise (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) has been sharing the shop, selling patties – an allegory for multiculturalism if ever there was one. But unfortunately, the business has tanked and the shop is about to be taken away from them.
The first half is a rambling affair, with monologue and dialogue deployed as the two offer their takes on each other and their men. I’m not sure the series actually NEEDED its two male writers to throw in a feminine perspective, and certainly ‘Closing Time’ unsurpisingly lacks the razor-sharp insights into femininity that its predecessors had into masculinity. It’s hardly a slog, though: some cheeky audience interaction livens things up, and there’s a big laugh from the reveal of the name of Carly and Delroy’s baby. But it lacks the momentum of the previous entries, plus it’s an unavoidable fact that at the time I saw it, the heroic Duncan-Brewster was underrehearsed (she had only taken the role on the previous week, replacing original star Jo Martin). She’s a good actor, but let’s not be sentimental here: she’ll be giving a better performance in a couple of weeks’ time.
The second half opens with the play’s best scene by a mile, a morbidly hilarious and utterly excruciating monologue from a pissed up, coke-addled Carly, holding court to an unseen group of gal pals about the ‘five ways to look after a Black man’. It’s an unsettling masterpiece of comic acting from Squires, and a tremendous piece of writing. Carly may be off her face, and everything she’s saying is doubtless true with specific regards to Delroy. But despite loving him, she is incapable of not seeing him as an other – he’ll always be a Black man to her, rather than a man.
It’s a bravura scene that the remainder of the play can’t top, as the plot spins off into an improbable tangent about Carly getting cancelled (which probably betrays the fact it was written by men of a certain age).
Still, if the reasons for Carly and Denise’s inability to run a shop together feel a touch preposterous, the fact of it is poignant. The very last image, in which the largely reconciled pair set to work shutting the shop down, feels powerful: less a vision of failure than a suggestion that if the present system doesn’t work, maybe we need to start again, together.