First there was Beginning. Then Middle. And now David Eldridge’s superlative trilogy about different couples at successive stages has come to a close with End. All three can be appreciated individually but the final play, which opened last week at the National Theatre in London, poignantly overlaps with its predecessors. If you’ve seen the other two, you can’t help but draw connections between them as much as you may find familiarities with your own relationships. Before too long, an enterprising theatre should stage all three plays together.
Beginning charted the drunken burgeoning of romance between a pair at a house party who are on each side of 40. Middle is about a marriage in crisis, with a young child also in the equation. Tenderly directed by Rachel O’Riordan, End finds Alfie and Julie squaring up to his cancer diagnosis after spending decades together. But the casting of the new play gives it an extra resonance as it reunites Clive Owen and Saskia Reeves more than 30 years after they starred together in Stephen Poliakoff’s Close My Eyes. I found the memory of that 1991 film complements the play enormously.
