Home Death, Finborough Theatre

What is a "good" death? How do most of us want to die? These are not questions that we often stop to ask, particularly in the theatre, where deaths tend to be either heroic or sordid. Two years ago, however, the playwright Nell Dunn’s partner of three decades died slowly, painfully, of lung cancer. On his last day he felt as if he were drowning, but of the five NHS professionals who visited him at home, all were trained to prolong life, none to ease the suffering of the dying. Home Death, therefore, is her story, and those of others, about dying at home: good deaths, bad deaths.

The 11 characters sit in an ordinary suburban sitting room, facing the audience as they relive these deaths, and their lives. Two have their "dead" friend or family member with them, others are alone, talking into the void; one pair of siblings perform a harmonious duet of memories. As the evening progresses, these stories turn into a sort of call-and-response of recurring prosaic details: of morphine dispensers; how to keep the dying clean while maintaining their dignity; how to reorganise a household around someone who is too weak to leave their bed. But there is also a second level of recurring details, the emotional: how petty aggravations suddenly vanish, allowing the period of dying to be a happy time, even, say several, the happiest times they have known. At these moments the individual stories transcend the particular and become universalised.

Diana and George Melly (Ania Marson and Malcolm Tierney) (main photo, above) sit centre stage, and Melly's decline and death predominates, as, dying of cancer and also suffering from dementia, the singer continues to perform and socialise even as his wife plans and replans – if we move his bedroom here, and put in a bathroom there, we will be able to manage; if I do this, we will be able to manage; if I do that, we won’t. She admits to enjoying being his carer, the role giving her a purpose and control that perhaps she had previously lacked in a marriage to an outsized personality. Control is an issue, too, with Lisa and Mary (Sara Griffiths and Judith Amsenga), sisters who look after their dying friend Mick (David Kershaw), a university lecturer who refuses to cede control: he wants to say where, when and how everything is going to be, as though, through an effort of will, he can assert control over death. These three young professionals become acutely unattractive (I suspect at least partly unknowingly to both their playwright creator and the performers themselves) as they react with disdain to clinics filled with people who don’t speak English, carers who do not have the same level of professional qualifications as they themselves do. They record pleasure only when discussing money spent, be it on trips abroad, or on Armani suits and linen sheets to accompany Mick’s dying – they appear as consumers in death as they have been in life.

By contrast, Lesley and Trevor (the ravishingly beautiful Laura Fitzpatrick and Marcus Cunningham), the successful children of a working-class mother, respond with stoicism and dignity to her dying, just as she herself does – "You get on with it," they report her saying; what they don’t report is that they get on with it too, doing what must be done, more heroically for it being unremarked by them. They expect no praise, and merit it the more.

Home Death, unsurprisingly for the author of Up the Junction and Poor Cow, is beautifully written, with a subtle, underplayed perception. Yet Dunn’s own story as portrayed by Linda Broughton (pictured right) remains only partially brought to life. Broughton herself performs acutely, but it is as though Dunn has not yet been able to apply to herself the writerly distance she applied to these others. Even so, there are flashes which bring home the surging emotions of the dying and their carers: when her partner tells her how much she has meant to him, she fails to answer. At first she tells herself it was because "I didn’t believe he was going to die. I knew he was, but I didn’t believe it." Then she admits, she was too angry – angry with him for abandoning her. She lists the many things she wished she had never done, the pettiness, the superficiality. (She refused to put in a stair-lift, "because it will mark the carpet".)

But while the evening (short, at 90 minutes with no interval) is intense and moving, with fine performances from all, it is hard to say that it is a theatrical event. In structure it resembles the “transcript” plays that have become so successful, whether replaying the Stephen Lawrence murder, or war-crimes trials. But there is no villain here, no revelation to be uncovered, so Home Death doesn’t have the same driving narrative force. It tells some important truths, both eternal and mundane – the need for medical professionals to have training not merely in saving lives but in easing death, that anger and hostility as well as love and compassion are natural responses – but there is no great “ah-ha” moment that theatre thrives on. Yet in its quiet universality, and in its sobering and authentic seriousness, it is certainly an evening well spent.

• Book tickets for Home Death at the Finborough Theatre till 25 July
• Find Home Death by Nell Dunn on Amazon
• See what else is on at the Finborough Theatre
• National Council for Palliative Care website
• Macmillan Cancer Support Network
• Admiral Nurses, for dementia support