End review, Dorfman: Clive Owen is on rumpled good form in this trilogy’s emotive final chapter

Novelists are all too aware that the secret to commercial success is a multi-part series, as thoroughly proven by canny authors from Dickens to Hilary Mantel to Hunger Games’ Suzanne Collins. But for a playwright, a series looks less like good business sense, more like dangerous optimism. Will audience members really have the time, lasting interest and spare cash to return to the theatre multiple times, often years apart? Playwright David Eldridge’s Beginning premiered in 2017, followed by Middle in 2022. Now, his trilogy of stories of ordinary Essex life is complete with End, an emotive look at how we choose to die and be remembered. It's a quietly moving play that makes sense on its own – without quite having the narrative heft to clean up as a piece of drama in its own right.

The action has moved to north London, where two Essex transplants are reckoning with death in their bougie kitchen. Clive Owen (Closer) is on rumpled good form here as Alfie, a middle-aged DJ who's fed up of fighting cancer and is ready to go out with a bang(er). Will his funeral guests go raving into the dying of the light, bopping to “Lady (Hear Me Tonight)” by Modjo? Or should he go for something more tasteful? His long-term partner Julie (Saskia Reeves) is a successful novelist with rather more romantic ideas for his end – she's penned an inscription for their shared gravestone that’s straight out of Shakespeare. Of course, he’d like to add a disco ball.

Eldridge’s dialogue wittily observes how people reconcile themselves to death by using humour, wild sentimentality, avoidance or grim fatalism. There’s a moving passage where Alfie reflects on his own father’s passing, which dragged on, stretching their limited emotional vocabulary past its limits. It is beautifully recounted by Owen. Reeves has a convincingly frenetic energy as Julie, but less compelling material to work with. She constantly escapes the deeper realities of love and death by bustling off to make a cup of tea that she never gets to drink. Gary McCann’s realistic kitchen set design captures all the luxuries and idiosyncrasies of an artsy north London home: minimalist design, cluttered up with a lifetime’s worth of treasured records and kitschy wall art. This really is a play to feel at home in, and Reeves and Owen capture all awkward realities of living as devoted, if mutually exasperated, life partners.

Still, there’s something slight and faltering about this story’s structure that makes it vaguely unsatisfying to watch, however much director Rachel O’Riordan plays with careful silences and changes of pace to break up its long conversations. From time to time, uglier themes surface. A past infidelity that won't stay buried. A worrisome mention of cancer clinics preys on people’s hopes. A suggestion that novelist Julie is viewing all this pain as material for her next book. But Eldridge’s narrative quickly moves past these chewier, more complex ideas and back to the safer emotional territory of bickering and reminiscing.

When novelists write their big bestselling trilogy, they need a killer story to tie all those words to. Eldridge’s mission here is deliberately different. The first two parts captured decidedly normal Essex couples falling in love, then (almost) falling apart, played out in real time. Its conclusion breaks new territory by showing a couple who’ve broken with their past, by moving away from their beloved home county, and by contemplating the still scarier reality of moving off this planet altogether. But it still feels like it’s building to something bigger that never comes – a pay-off, postponed in favour of yet another cup of tea.