The Death of England trilogy began a decade ago, with a short play about a flower-stall trader, Michael Fletcher, mourning his well-loved but stubbornly racist father. That two black playwrights, Roy Williams and Clint Dyer, gave such potent expression to white working-class anger, two years before the Brexit referendum, “messed with some heads”, Williams later recalled. The pair followed Michael with a monologue for his black best friend, Delroy, and Closing Time, a two-hander between Delroy’s mother, Denise, and his partner, Carly (who is also Michael’s sister). Now all three shows are being revived.
Viewed together, in the wake of the summer’s far-right riots (“Or should I call them protests?” Delroy asks), the plays – staged on a cruciform platform evoking St George’s Cross – capture the morbid symptoms of a nation adrift. But one of the strengths of the scripts by Williams and Dyer (who also directs) is that they are largely led by character, not politics.
Michael (Thomas Coombes) embodies the chaotic energy of grief as he lurches across the stage in his badly buttoned funeral shirt; Delroy (Paapa Essiedu) switches between total composure and fury as he tells the story of his wrongful arrest. Both do their best to project masculine bravado and charm, while nursing a profound vulnerability and confusion about their place in the world. Carly (Erin Doherty) and Denise (Sharon Duncan-Brewster), about to shutter their florist-café, reveal the events leading to its collapse with bitterness, tenderness, and explosive wit. Michael and Carly at times challenge and at others channel their father’s racism in a way that defies an easy moral response.
“You may sound like us, act like us, but you will never be one of us,” Michael says to Delroy in a moment of chilling clarity. But however bleak a prognosis these plays present, they do not write the English off just yet. “We can try,” Carly insists to Denise, “and hold a complicated past and a vision of the present and future? Can’t we? We can hold two ideas in our head without trying to shit on one of them?”
[See also: Who are Britain’s new aristocrats?]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 11 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The Iron Chancellor’s gamble