THE SAD SERIOUS COMEDY OF DEATH
A Devon cottage kitchen, opening to a tangled spring garden: beyond this idyll a semi- abstract tangle of branches around a great circle of sky: a hole , perhaps a portal. For in a back room, unseen, an old man is nearing the end of his life’s journey. In such times a kitchen can fill with family and visitors: weary daughter Sarah is tired from nighttime calls, soon brother Jonathan is back from London, tensely on the phone to an unseen girlfriend unlikely to turn up and share this death-watch. But an earlier, betrayed one, does. Wants to see old Edward one more time.
There’s a posse of official helpers. First on, doffing her coat, middle-aged Karen bustles comfortably about, efficiently nurselike , chatting about reading-glasses. Others appear, talking of hoists and morphine and changes in the dying man’s breath, doing a matter of fact job kindly, with years of experience. THe siblings, joined by one ex-partner and one possibly-current one lack any such aid to emotional balance. They are vulnerable to explosions of pointless frustration: first Jonathan, with a cursing shout about strawberry yoghurt after an absurd and horribly recognizable, polite domestic discussion about it.
The helpers – especially Lizzie Hopley’s gloriously northern Linda – are calmer. They’ve seen deaths before, are kind, midwives to this strange, hard time. Sometimes, in quiet moments of memory, the group of mourners speak beautifully in memory: Mariam Haque’s troubled Nell remembers old Edward saying of the home he built with his family that when you arrive and click the garden gate shut, you feel everything is all right. More often there is comic absurdity tinged with metaphor: throughout the first half Paul Thornley’s Graham is uninvitedly trying to mend the toaster. He keeps saying “All it is, is – the release mechanism..”. They are all waiting for the ultimate release mechanism. For old Edward
Sometimes they are purely absurd, helplessly, resentfully ridiculous in the way we all are over matters of dodgy bread-knives and wrong orders of Chinese takeaway. The playwright and director, after all, is John Morton, whose sharp observation of ordinary life’s expressions and disguises gave us joy on television in Twenty Twelve, W1A and now Twenty Twenty Six. All three TV series were dealing with boards of management, but before that he wrote groundbreaking People Like Us and the strength of his portraits of institutional-man is his understanding that he is just everyman in a business suit. So this, his first stage play, is at moments very funny indeed.
But its centre is compassion: the core characters wound tight with tension, bottled-up British. As nurses, a doctor, milkman and postman come and go the immensity of Edward’s unseen battle hangs over everything. It takes professional Karen, near the end, to tell the civilians “there’s nothing to be frightened of at all”. Everything will be all right. That last click on the old man’s gate of life will be soon. In the weary small hours it comes. So does dawn.
Morton tells that he wrote this over many years after his own father’s last days, with visiting nurses and carers easing it. It feels like a tribute to those professionals who deal daily with the immensity of death. Parish’s tense Sarah, Rupert Penry-Jones’ conflicted, restless Jonathan, Haque’s nostalgic, regretful Nell are the amateurs “It’s your first time” one is told, gently.
I acquit Morton and Chichester of any topical calculation, but this play – which feels, in a good way, more like a poem or a watercolour than hard drama – comes at an apt time. We have had long months and bitter arguments around assisted dying, always promoted with the idea of “sparing” families the memory of watching these long, last struggles. ECLIPSE has no agenda, but feels in the end like a philosophical affirmation of the fact that, by proxy and at last in person, we all we all have a duty to face the reality of being mortal. It is a serious message.
Cft.org.uk to 10 June
Rating 4
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