Clive Owen and Saskia Reeves’ screen history makes their on-stage reunion even more emotional | stage

FIn the beginning there was the beginning. Then the middle. And now David Eldridge’s wonderful trilogy about different couples in successive stages has come to an end with the finale. All three can be appreciated individually, but the latest play, which opened last week at the National Theater in London, poignantly intertwines with its predecessors. If you have seen the other two, you cannot help but draw connections between them as much as you might find what is familiar in your own relationships. Before long, the adventurous theater should present all three plays together.

The beginning charted the blossoming of a drunken romance between a 40-something couple at a house party. The middle is about a marriage in crisis, with a young child also in the equation. Tenderly directed by Rachel O’Riordan, End finds Alfie and Julie confronting a cancer diagnosis after spending decades together. But the casting of the new play gives it extra resonance because it reunites Clive Owen and Saskia Reeves more than 30 years after they starred together in Stephen Poliakoff’s Close My Eyes. I found that the memory of this 1991 film complemented the play greatly.

Inspired by Poliakoff’s 1975 play Hit the Town, Close My Eyes caused a tabloid frenzy for its frank depiction of an incestuous relationship between Natalie (Reeves) and her younger brother Richard (Owen). The film has a similar elegiac tone to Eldridge’s play, partly due to the nature of their relationship, which was doomed before it began. In addition to this final collapse, Polyakov offers other endings. Close My Eyes begins with Natalie’s recent separation, her and Richard’s parents’ divorce in the background and Richard’s AIDS-stricken classmate dying. As Natalie’s new husband, Sinclair (Alan Rickman), puts it last: “Something tells me this is the end of the party.”

Natalie and Richard’s relationship unfolds partly amidst the regeneration of London’s docklands, and stands against a volatile society and the explosion of ruthless Thatcherite individualism in the 1980s. Some critics have seen incest as a symbol of the moral decadence and urban decline of the era – Poliakoff has a character who makes this comparison in Hitting Town. But in the film, the couple’s union is presented as a retreat from a world that is shown not only to be politically corrupt, but also disrupted by the horror of the AIDS crisis and climate chaos. “If you were to say, ‘Why are you using this taboo?'” Polyakov told the Observer when the film was shown. I would say that I want the film to be a seductive experience with dual concerns: unstable weather and the threat of AIDS. As with all my stories, I try to get into the subconscious, so the story sticks around. I wanted it to have a haunting, end-of-the-decade, end-of-the-century feeling.

Eldridge places the personal turmoil between Alfie and Julie in one of the most divisive periods in modern British political history. The finale takes place on a summer morning in 2016, a week before the Brexit vote. This was mentioned while walking past Julie, but Alfie is more preoccupied with a bigger upset: the departure of his beloved West Ham from Upton Park after more than 100 years. When he talks about his career as a DJ, providing people with sparks of joy on the dance floor in a dark, unpredictable world, it brings to mind Richard and Natalie stowing away on illicit afternoons that are presented as almost over.

The memory of the intense sex scenes in I Close My Eyes (“One is almost embarrassed to watch,” Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times) also serves to heighten Eldridge’s play. Natalie and Richard are at times literally and almost comically hot under the collar as they are consumed by an obsessive, addictive relationship – in one scene she insists that he stay on the other side of the room while she tries to subdue their passion. In the end, both Owen and Reeves have beautiful, delicate physiques that reflect the easy comfort of their decades together as well as an inevitable sense of distance. Early on, Alfie wonders out loud whether they will ever make love again. His illness means he uses a crutch and moves awkwardly. As he stands motionless and plays a house music track in competition for his funeral playlist, she dances playfully and seductively around him.

That moment is then echoed in the rarest of theatrical sex scenes (intimately directed by Bethan Clarke). In contrast to the abundant, artfully framed nudity in Poliakoff’s film, Alfie and Julie quickly shake out their hair on the sofa, almost fully clothed. Both actors expertly bring out their characters’ vulnerabilities, their ease with each other and their care, their love and their fear. It has humor, melancholy and sheer authenticity in a short, sweet evocation of their most youthful passion and abandon.

When actors reunite to play couples, it’s often with the same characters from the sequel, but when the roles are new, they can’t help but bring in the ghosts of their predecessors. Finally, I was reminded of Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer playing the emotionally volatile Frankie and Johnny eight years after they played Tony and Elvira in Scarface, and the contrast between their encounter on the dance floor of a flashy club in the former film and the ramshackle house party they attend in the latter.

The actors’ previous roles can stick with them, something director Jamie Lloyd often exploits, although I was already struggling to buy into the characters of his West End film Much Ado About Nothing before Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell accompanied entire cardboard cutouts of their Marvel characters. The ending is even more powerful in its evocation of its stars’ screen history. When Alfie remembers his old “baby-faced” self, she alludes to Owen’s TV role as Chancellor as well as the smartly dressed Richard. The delicacy of his previous roles (remember when he was touted as the next James Bond?) underscores the disheveled tracksuit-clad Alfie; His first appearance, standing stiffly with a haunted look in his eyes, elicits a double stare. In a strange way, Julie’s success as novelist in Eldridge helps realize Natalie’s frustrated creative ambitions in I Close My Eyes.

Poliakoff’s film is often contradictory. The nature of their relationship means that even in the first flush of their romance, Natalie and Richard share the age-old squabbling of siblings and have a whole history as brother and sister to resolve. Like End, it is balanced between past and future. Although the specter of a possible pregnancy (emphasized in Hitting Town) does not loom in Close My Eyes, general anxiety about what lies ahead is often expressed by Rickman’s character, who has made a fortune through stock forecasts.

Eldridge’s play poignantly imagines the family’s life without Alfie, a future that Julie finds she can only process by painting it as if it were one of her own, as Alfie, navigating his farewell in terms of choosing the right DJ. The dance floor becomes a compelling motif for the trilogy’s stages – it’s the place where Alfie experiences first kisses and breakups – and Eldridge draws a nice analogy between storytelling and choosing the right records as well as finding the right words. Although End was written without Owen and Reeves in mind (props to director Alastair Comer for bringing them together again), their old film gives this wonderfully performed new play a wonderful charge of intimacy.