Closing Time gives you hope for theatre’s future

Serious makers of theatre are telling me their audiences have if not disappeared after the pandemic then certainly been significantly depleted. Shows that have won rave reviews are often at best just washing their faces financially.

Theories abound about what’s happened: too many punters got used during the lockdowns to staying in and watching Netflix, ticket prices are now prohibitively expensive, and, most depressingly of all, there’s a generation coming up that just hasn’t the sensitivity it takes to appreciate theatre.

Maybe all three have combined to create a perfect storm for theatre, but, coming to London in the 1980s, there was a real buzz about it. It would often form the basis of discussions over lunches in office canteens. Courtship necessitated, at some point or other, a good play. I belonged to a generation that wanted to better itself and become fluent in the emotional literacy that theatre could help to provide.

What has cheered me, then, about the Death of England trilogy of plays – Closing Time, the final instalment featuring Erin Doherty and Sharon Duncan-Brewster, has just opened – is that they’re attracting youthful, ethnically diverse and above all enthusiastic audiences. What is happening on the stage in these shows is impressive – great actors in great roles that put the state of our nation under the microscope – but it’s looking around the auditorium at your fellow punters that may be the most thrilling part about it. These audiences give me hope that theatre has a future, after all.

Erin Doherty plays a character that could not be more far removed from her haughty Princess Anne in The Crown. She plays the loud and lippy daughter of a racist white man who has fallen in love with a black man.

The play charts the relationship she has with his mother, played with a stoical world-weariness by Sharon Duncan-Brewster. The two characters dominate the stage and establish a knowing rapport with their audience – at one point Doherty casually tells Duncan-Brewster that it’s her turn to talk to the punters – and they enact the journey of their coming to terms with each other affectingly and often hilariously.

Too often, theatre has been complacent or indifferent to the world around us and the dramatic societal changes we are seeing. Clint Dyer and Roy Williams – the writers of the Death of England trilogy – have missed nothing at all.

Even the row about the residents of one London suburb taking exception to the arrival of a twee Gail’s bakery is referenced in this play and there’s an awareness, too, of the proximity of Nadine Dorries’ tongue to Boris Johnson’s posterior.

This is a funny, honest, dazzling and bang-up-to-date play that Dyer – also directing – had made into a fitting finale to a great series of state-of-the-nation plays.

The Death of England plays – including the latest, Closing Time – are being staged at Sohoplace theatre in London until September 28