End

As an ex-Essex girl, this was a poignant trip down memory lane for my last trip to the theatre this year, taking me back to my teens and old stomping grounds with DJ Froggy and junior disco nights, and that bit of Essex that continues to sit on the edge of London.   Alfie (Clive Owen) and Julie (Saskia Reeves) have been together for over 30 years, but Alfie has received a terminal diagnosis for his cancer and wants to stop treatment, Julie wants him to ‘fight’. Alfie was a DJ, and the whole play is punctuated with some pounding house and acid disco beats to punctuate their conversations as they both reminisce and look forward, including debating what should be played at his funeral.  There are some lovely intimate and funny moments that are evidence of their long relationship, as they have one long conversation in a single scene for the full 90 minutes of this play as they talk and laugh and argue, sparring and making up, as they talk about what this will mean for them and their family, whether a single clean 'end' is best, or something messier but that involves the whole family.  Who is this life and death for and what does it mean to have a good end?  

Along the way they reminisce about the life they have had, including things that they haven't ever talked about, discovering new things about each other but also taking stock of what is a good life.  Does Julie's life as a successful novelist count for more than Alfie's as a DJ, creating fleeting moments of joy for his audiences?    Alfie's reminiscences are full of references to places around Essex, Ilford, Collier Row, Romford, Hornchurch, Barking and especially, as a West Ham fan, Upton Park, and I really enjoyed that sense of place which took me back a bit, and their quiet discomfort at how they have now become middle class.   Both Clive Owen and Saskia Reeves are excellent, and dealt well with quite long monologues which, although they sometimes didn’t quite hit as a real conversation, were still worth listening to.  It's also full of small humour, for example the running joke about making a cup of tea which they never actually get to drink, and a few big laughs, for example following his worry about ending up in a cemetery with 'Karl fucking Marx' and the Crouch End set.

I haven’t seen the earlier plays in the trilogy (Beginning and Middle) and so I expect I missed some subtleties but it was still thought provoking, and by the end gently moving and even a bit uplifting, with a reminder that ordinary lives can still be vivid in their detail, and definitely not beige as we were played out of the auditorium with yet another pounding beat.