Dorfman theatre, London
David Eldridge’s two-hander depicts the difficult conversations that follow one partner’s cancer diagnosis
avid Eldridge’s trilogy has travelled across the early and mid stages of coupledom to come to this finish. The play marks the end of an era in more ways than one. Programmed in Rufus Norris’s final season as the National Theatre’s director, it is also a farewell for the couple at its centre. This is grown up, bittersweet fare that brings with it a full-bodied reflection on the end that awaits us all: death.
A natural order was branded into Eldridge’s previous two plays – Beginning was about the heady spark of a first romance, Middle the sag of an established relationship. This one grapples with a more unforeseen end. Alfie (Clive Owen) is a DJ in his 50s who made his name on the acid house scene. Julie (Saskia Reeves) is a successful novelist. His terminal cancer diagnosis is announced in the opening lines and the play becomes a reflection on what happens when a lifetime of togetherness meets mortality.
Like the different couples in the previous plays, they are Essex-born but Alfie and Julie have long since moved out of Brentwood Park and into leafy north London (not far, it seems, from the Crouch End location of Beginning). “Where you’re from never leaves you,” Julie says nonetheless. It’s true in the case of Alfie. He wants to stop chemotherapy and be buried on Brentwood soil, close to his departed family. She wants him to continue treatment for the sake of the family around him, still living.
