Death of England: Closing Time review

Doherty’s Carly, radiating sex and swagger, brilliantly combines the tough and tender, as well as morphing miraculously into her blustering dad and a teenage memory of her brother at his most gawky and gormless. Duncan-Brewster, meanwhile, is a volcano of grief, pain and fury, elegantly smouldering between red-hot, lava-spitting eruptions. They sling words back and forth at each other, and at us, weighing up the damage that might be done or the points scored and proven, rolling the choicest lines around their mouths with casual relish. The dramatic texture is vivid as well as combative, and often richest in its smaller details. Carly recalls her father stroking her face with “rough sausage fingers”; Denise describes the sweaty, heart-flipping horror of staring at her phone as the online evidence of Carly’s awful treachery goes viral. The piece is strong on the blood sport and mob mentality of social media, faceless commenters queuing up to castigate and punish moral transgressors. And in a flashback scene in which the family gathers to watch Charles’ coronation on telly, there’s a delicious takedown of the archaic, pantomime privilege of the Royal family; Carly and Delroy’s baby daughter is named Meghan, a mischievous touch.

But this is above all a play about England itself, which has even been updated to include mention of the recent riots; a portrait of a country of push and pull, angry, confused and afraid, but where there is also striving for connection and hope for greater harmony. Line by line it may not always fully convince; yet as a whole, the trilogy feels like work of genuine historical significance. And it could hardly be more thrillingly performed.