Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Since the first two plays in the Death of England trilogy, Michael and Delroy, opened earlier in the summer, the murders in Southport and subsequent racist riots have given the plays’ interrogation of toxic whiteness a new urgency. In Closing Time, also by Clint Dyer and Roy Williams, it’s the women who get to talk about their lives and, by extension, the state of the nation (disunited, disgruntled, dissatisfied).The first plays were monologues, outlining the friendship of Michael, white, and Delroy, Black, both cemented and complicated by Delroy’s love for Michael’s sister, Carly. With two-hander Closing Time, the focus switches to the relationship between Carly (Erin Doherty) and her “mother-in-sin” Denise (Sharon Duncan-Brewster), a forced liaison between opposites that’s combative and at bottom affectionate, though neither would admit it.Banging music cues, blackouts and the set all reinforce stylistic links to the previous plays, with the action taking place once more on a platform evoking the cross of St George, quartering the stage into four sunken areas. Denise and Carly occupy diagonally opposite spaces, representing their Caribbean bakery and flower shop respectively. Depressed, they are packing up ready to hand over the keys; their family businesses are being ousted due to gentrification: “Another fucking Gail’s!” And that’s about it for plot.In the previous plays, Thomas Coombes and Paapa Essiedu played brilliantly in the round, spinning and gambolling with manic eye contact to engage the whole audience. Doherty and Duncan-Brewster are no less charismatic and compelling, but the points when the pair turn in and interact are like a vortex, sucking the attention away from the viewer. It doesn’t help that the banter, delivered at volume and high velocity, is sometimes hard to catch. At 100 minutes (no interval) the play could last half as long again if the pair weren’t chatting at warp speed. It’s an extraordinary feat of stamina and agility nonetheless.Compared with Delroy’s moist-eyed anticipation of fatherhood in the earlier play, there is little emphasis here that Carly is now a mother, although there is a nice moment when she struggles to define her daughter’s roots with sufficient correctness: “Mixed race, um, um, dual heritage?” Denise’s speeches on “assumptions about us” and defence of “wokeness”, while moving, seem shoehorned in, as does her castigation of Carly’s “white feminism”. Carly wouldn’t know feminism from phenomenology.More effective is the playwrights’ teasing out of what it’s permissible to laugh at in terms of race and how much depends on who’s laughing. There are two skilled, high-octane performances to enjoy here, but with its talk, talk, talk and lack of character development or incident, this doesn’t feel like a play.★★★☆☆To September 28, sohoplace.org
