Next Sunday, the National Theatre celebrates its 60th birthday. How fitting that this should be marked by the opening of Death of England, a vital exploration of the state of Britain. How apt that this exploration should have been atomised, split into separate dramas: fragmented like the country it investigates. How enriching that it should accumulate, building an arc across generations. What a distance from the first instalment and this, the fourth.
Written by Clint Dyer and Roy Williams, the saga began in February 2020, with a scorching monologue by a young white man, looking back on a just-dead racist father. It ends, for now, with a black woman in her 50s and a thirtysomething white woman who are unofficially mother- and daughter-in-law. A baby with a black father and a white mother is crucial to the plot: perhaps in time she will have her own play?
Entwined with the country’s catastrophes, these dramas have also been affected by them. An understudy had to step in for the second play, which had been scheduled to mark the reopening of the National after seven months of Covid darkness; then new restrictions meant that its first night was also its last. A third episode was filmed – not staged – during lockdown. The opening of Closing Time was delayed: Jo Martin had to withdraw from the production because of illness, replaced at the last minute by Sharon Duncan-Brewster.
What a triumph Duncan-Brewster has, using her particular gift of conveying power without effort. Though working with script in hand on the night I saw her, she is utterly concentrated, with no superfluous gesture or vocal tremor: she wears anger with ease, not so much as armour as a sheath. Hayley Squires is a telling contrast; her face and hair scrunched up, darting, anxious, blundering – and suddenly generous. Both actors occasionally voice the words of unseen characters, their ventriloquism of a piece with that of the playwrights: middle-aged, black British males who bring these women – warring and fond – to precise, edgy life.
Dyer directs, with verve. Jackie Shemesh’s lighting pounces with a bang of brightness on different areas to open the action, played out on a giant scarlet Saint George’s cross designed by Sadeysa Greenaway-Bailey and ULTZ. On the walls are small boxes, mini-installations containing historical evidence: boxing gloves, a framed picture of a baby, a trophy. This catwalk court offers nowhere to hide: it is a place to strut and confront. Like standups, both actors occasionally break out of monologue to address the audience, rammed up close against the stage.
This is an outward-facing play, bouncing off, and fuelled by, outside events: Duncan-Brewster makes less-than-enthusiastic references to the coronation of King Charles while she sits on a union jack. Yet it is also inward and jagged, fuelled by feeling: the scorn of Duncan-Brewster’s character for the white tourist in a black family who embarrassingly adopts patois; the guilt of Squires at a racist betrayal – and her sudden imaginative leap. It also contains one of the best ever accounts of falling in love.
This is the opposite of family saga, as seen in Galsworthy’s Forsytes or Succession, set in rooms full of conversation, with plots hinging on connivance and material inheritance. There is a financial legacy here – a failed shop that has mopped up everyone’s money – but it is not the main point. What is passed down from generation to generation is less obvious, more debatable: political assumptions, allegiance to Leyton Orient, skin colour. All these things are transmitted, intertwined and altered. There is a glimmer of a new nation.
Stephen Sondheim decided not to make a musical version of Billy Wilder’s 1950 movie Sunset Boulevard when Wilder told him: “It has to be an opera… because it is about a dethroned queen.” This was not an impediment to Andrew Lloyd Webber, whose sung-through, tango-touched, big-ballad-heavy, chorus-bouncing show, first seen 30 years ago, has book and lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton.
The director Jamie Lloyd seizes the story of Norma Desmond, the deluded, faded movie star, and shakes it: the first thing to drop out is furniture. This homage to film noir takes place on a bare stage, designed by Soutra Gilmour, shaped by Jack Knowles’s dusky lighting and puffs of smoke: a place of illusions. Lloyd, not afraid of ramming home a point, runs black-and-white video of the action at the back of the stage: massive closeups of tears, uvulas and mics caterpillaring across singers’ cheeks, like scars. He underlines the dodging of what is here called “ree-al-it-eeeeee” by videoing Tom Francis’s persuasive hero going backstage – past a cutout of Lloyd Webber – and strolling on to the Strand.
Homage dwarfs individual tragedy here. Nicole Scherzinger, formerly of the Pussycat Dolls, sings sumptuously: creamy and hammering. Yet she never sacrifices beauty to expressiveness. Slinking gracefully in a black satin slip, she looks about the same age as the younger version of herself who bottom-waggles gracefully around the stage. Purring and snarling, she sounds desperate, but never ravaged or – more damaging – ludicrous.
As Scherzinger ballads away (to an ecstatic audience) her arms continually reach out, as if embracing a sacred bowl. She is trapped by the limitations of her numbers: ballads with souped-up strings and endlessly extended notes. Like every character, she is also clobbered by thumping rhymes in sung dialogue: “Can’t we speak on the tel-e-phone?” (To rhyme with “own”). Strangely, one of the liveliest sequences might have been expected to be the most routine: a chorus line for “Every movie’s a circus” has kids in black rehearsal gear jumping up and down like notes on a piano, in an episode which is truly of the stage. Elsewhere, cinematic echoes dominate. Huge shadows, with phallus-like heads, loom noirishly; David Thaxton, delivering the most amusing moments as Desmond’s ex, looks as if a bolt might be about to come out of his neck; Francis, in white T-shirt, hands in pockets, channels James Dean. Scherzinger ends with the bloodied face of a vampiric woman. Genre swamps character: it is a dazzling argument, but more hologram than heart.
Star ratings (out of five)
Death of England: Closing Time ★★★★
Sunset Boulevard ★★★
