End
National Theatre - Dorfman
20 November 2025
★★★★

END completes David Eldridge’s National Theatre trilogy, following his earlier plays, Beginning and Middle.

Together they chart three different stages of a relationship through the lives of three different couples. All have premiered at the National Theatre, Beginning and Middle directed by Polly Findlay while End falls to the capable hands of Rachel O’Riordan.

The couple in End are just pushing sixty: Julie still fit and clearly running the home with aplomb, while Alfie is terminally ill. It’s heavy stuff.

Indeed, right from the opening line when Alfie informs Julie that he will refuse all further treatment for his cancer, we are immersed in an intense and private drama, the gulf profound between the doomed sufferer and the one with a remaining future… even as they converse, declare love and struggle to negotiate the chasm.

The play is built primarily on extended discussion, as well as on the understandably obsessive ramblings of Alfie as his brain stumbles fitfully into the certain and fearful prospect of his own demise.

And it grabs the audience in a way that only death staring us in the face can do. It would be relentlessly grim but for the truthfulness of the writing, the quality of the production and the vigorous characterisation.

Both Clive Owen and Saskia Reeves deliver immaculate performances, filled with humour and tenderness. And the dialogue twists and turns and holds us in its thrall.

Gary McCann’s set has all the attention to detail we expect of the National Theatre: a busy, lived-in home with kitchen, sofa, table, bookshelves and a view of the welcoming front door. It also has shelves devoted to music – CDs, vinyl and an old-style sound system.

For Alfie is a passionate muso, a lifelong career DJ and a purist, so bitter against the populist that he abhors the idea of Imagine being sung at his funeral or a burial in Highgate next to Karl Marx.

The couple retain working-class Essex personae that seem to belie their declared rise in the world. And the play is more about Alfie than it is about Julie who – focused on her career as a novelist and their shared daughter – mostly humours him.

Owen is utterly moving as the man walking with a stick and fraught with fear and pain, while Reeves splendidly captures the humdrum as she relentlessly fulfils chores and kindly listens. Her brief display of sensual dancing and quick sexual gratification of Alfie on the sofa bring unexpected action to what is otherwise a sad slice of life.

It’s impossible to fully appreciate this play except as the culmination of Eldridge’s whole trilogy where love and the collective is always complicated by intense individual experience.  

That such partnerships not only exist but abide is perhaps a miracle of our existence, the search for love and for true union driving us all to endless compromise.

End speaks to us all in its simple humanity and yet feels deeply personal to the playwright too: compelling, bleak but immaculately performed.

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