Death of England: Closing Time review – 'bold, brash reflection on racism'

In the weeks since the opening of the first two plays in Clint Dyer and Roy Williams's reprised "Death of England" trilogy – which is being performed together for the first time – "racist riots" in England's cities have given their "interrogation of toxic whiteness a new urgency", said Suzi Feay in the FT. 

First staged at the National in 2020, the first two parts are monologues, which introduce us to Michael (Thomas Coombes), a working-class white man raised by a racist father, and Delroy (Paapa Essiedu), his Black British, pro-Brexit best friend. Their friendship is "both cemented and complicated" by Delroy's love for Michael's sister Carly. In "Closing Time", a two-hander that was staged at the National three years later, Carly and Delroy's mother Denise "talk about their lives" and, by extension, "the state of the nation". 

Dyer and Williams have been hailed for skilfully tapping into "contemporary political tensions", said Rachel Halliburton in The Times. In this "excoriating" third part, Carly (Erin Doherty) and Denise (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) are facing the collapse of the small business they've been running together; and in quickfire dialogue, they cover "everything from the middle-class blight of Gail's bakery to inherited racism". Duncan-Brewster superbly conveys her character's "simmering rage" about the failure of the shop for which she sacrificed so much; and though this anger seems not initially to be targeted directly at Doherty's "mouthy, amusingly defensive Carly", we get flashes of the "knots and contradictions that have trapped them both". 

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This is a "bold, brash reflection on racism, white culpability and working-class identity", said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. But it's flawed. The piece's emotional power is diluted by "exaggerated" comedy and a near farcical amount of shouting and stomping, and the script's bagginess is more apparent in this reprisal. For too long, "the dialogue wanders aimlessly", and key points are lost owing to the speed of the delivery. The play is not without searing moments, but overall, it's too hectic and too loose.