From its inception as an online microplay to its flowering into three full-length dramas, the Death of England series has examined what it means to be British from the viewpoint of two men: Michael, the son of a white racist flower-seller, and Delroy, his Black British friend.
In Death of England: Face to Face in 2021, Michael mourned his father’s death while Delroy had a baby with Michael’s sister, Carly. The friends stood on the cusp of going into business together, with the help of Delroy’s mother, Denise, and her life savings.
That business has now bombed and in Closing Time, co-written by Clint Dyer and Roy Williams, with Dyer again directing, we hear the story from Denise (Jo Martin) and Carly (Hayley Squires). There is an interplay of dialogue and monologue, along with some audience interaction (Carly asks one viewer to hold a broom, Denise asks another to turn off their phone). The pair enact flashbacks, too, playing multiple parts. Michael and Delroy are invoked through angsty references that they are at the football when they should be helping them pack up Carly’s flower shop, and Denise’s patty shop. The women throw snide words and side-eyes at each other. A suggestion of serious wrongdoing on Carly’s part blooms in a shock revelation.
But before that there is a baggy beginning. “As you probably know by now, my dad was a man of his generation,” says Carly, and she elaborates on his racist “tendencies”. Denise talks in exposition, too, not servicing the plot. The production is again designed by Sadeysa Greenaway-Bailey and Ultz in the shape of a St George’s Cross. At times it tries too hard, with fast cuts between scenes as if on film, accompanied by dramatic sound (Benjamin Grant and Pete Malkin) and lighting (Jackie Shemesh) but set to humdrum dialogue.
The play finds its footing by the second act and is well worth the wait, with some hair-raising set pieces. Revved up, both actors bring riotous energy, especially Squires. A scene in which a drunken Carly tells a hen party the “five rules of keeping a Black man” is a masterclass in multi-voiced, actorly athleticism. Earlier we heard about her first teenage encounter with Delroy, which appeared to be a comic riff on the sexualising of Black men at the time but gains its sting now.
Martin dazzles too, playing Denise and all her friends at once, or oozing scorn at the King’s coronation. This blackly comic scene will bring satisfaction to any republican for its delicious takedown of a royal family of “white colonialists”.
Mixed-race relationships are scrutinised in serious and comic ways. Carly and Delroy’s daughter is named Meghan – surely a piece of mischief from Dyer and Williams – and Denise tartly claims that her family has a mixed-race couple too, in Carly and Delroy, but that “unlike the Royal family, it’s working”.
The women are ultimately slightly generic yet lovable. Love, in the end, is the point: like Michael and Delroy, Carly and Denise are flawed, contradictory, at odds, but stand by each other in spite of it. You can’t help but be moved as they walk into the future together, hand in hand.
At the Dorfman theatre, National Theatre, London, until 11 November
Since reviewing the production, Jo Martin has been indisposed. The role of Denise is now performed by Sharon Duncan-Brewster.
