Alfie (Clive Owen) is dying of cancer. Julie (Saskia Reeves) is not. A couple since their twenties, their lives are about to diverge dramatically, though precisely how dramatically is up for grabs. David Eldridge’s new play begins with a physically ailing Alfie telling Julie he wants to stop treatment, before proceeding to splurge all manner of wild thoughts, theories and plans about his imminent death.
End follows Eldridge’s Beginning and Middle at the National Theatre. I’m not sure I’d call them his mid-life-crisis trilogy. But certainly in sum they are about as rigorous an interrogation of middle age as exists in the British theatrical canon.
The fizzy, sexy smash Beginning was about the rush of first attraction between a 38-year-old and a divorced 42-year-old.
Middle was about a slightly older couple stuck in the rut of a predictable long-term marriage.
With their handsome-looking north London house, Alfie and Julie are initially coded as the sort of monied older couple that has popped up in English theatre for centuries. The fact they’re actually just 59 comes as a slight surprise (Owen and Reeves are actually a few years older), but it’s their cultural references that feel the most startling. It soon transpires that Alfie was a big time acid house DJ, a subject he basically never stops talking about; there’s something disconcerting about thinking of that generation as ‘old’ now. End is not about Gen X dying out en masse: it’s kind of a point of the play that Julie probably has decades ahead of her. But it is about mortality creeping in as a daily reality rather than a distant hypothetical, about the vibrantly rebellious culture of Eldridge’s youth now fading into the past tense.
What Eldridge’s text and Rachel O’Riordan’s production do really well is capture the sense of a couple whose longevity has been achieved by not communicating. Now they feel like they have to say some major unsaid things, and have no idea how to do it. Their conversation is haphazard and scattered, vaulting between banal chitchat and huge existential issues. There’s a wariness between them: Alfie looks pensive when he plays Julie the songs – dance anthems, natch – that he had in mind for his funeral. She’s torn between demanding he fight to the end and pragmatically planning her life without him.
As is the way with life, End is a victim of Beginning. That play was set in the aftermath of a houseparty, and followed its protagonists in real time as they met and chatted for the first time. That made sense.
But Alfie and Julie’s dialogue and actions often feel wildly implausible in the context of a 90-minute realtime conversation, overly crammed with exposition and incident. Some veering in tone makes sense, but it gets a bit silly here. It’s a naturalistic drama, but (without wishing to spoiler) it becomes increasingly hard to believe a conversation like this would ever happen.
I think the play would have benefitted from being divided into scenes that were spread over a longer period of time, without a startling new revelation or turn of events every ten minutes in what’s meant to be a single chat. I’d assume the main reason for not doing this is because it’s aping the structure of Beginning. But I wish if felt a little more like its own play.
Still, I appreciated Eldridge’s ideas, even if there were too many of them. Owen and Reeves put in lovely performances as loving but complicated people forced into unfamiliar new terrain by the direst of circumstances. The acid house angle is maybe pushed a bit hard, but it’s a fun flavour to throw in.
Ultimately if Beginning is the only classic of the trilogy, the three plays sit very nicely together thematically – it’s been great to watch a playwright as emotionally astute as Eldridge excavate his middle years so single-mindedly.
