Inflamed by Brexit and first staged (and cancelled) under Covid, I feared that Roy Williams and Clint Dyer’s exploration of the British white and black working-class experience might have dated in this West End transfer. Absolutely not.
Michael and Delroy, the two male monologues in the linked Death of England trilogy (Closing Time, a female two-hander, joins in repertory later) are full of contemporary rage, swagger and furious feeling.
Thomas Coombes and Paapa Essiedu give tour de force performances as boyhood best friends in hardscrabble East London, for whom the racial divide keeps reopening like a wound. I get the feeling the writers found their characters and just let them run.
Seeing the first two 100-minute, free-ranging installments, which deal respectively with death and birth from a hapless male perspective, is a lot; seeing all three, as you can on Saturdays from 24 Aug, would be exhausting, though it would balance out the testosterone a bit.
DOE started as a 10-minute workshopped ‘microplay’ in 2014 but grew to embrace the referendum on EU membership and the rise of populist dog-whistle politics. Dyer’s original full stagings at the National Theatre – staggered in every sense – became a bellwether for theatre’s woes during and after Covid.
Rafe Spall’s performance as Michael, a chaotic young man mourning his racist father, was cut short by lockdown in early 2020. Michael Balogun career-makingly stepped in to replace Giles Terera in Delroy later that year for a single performance as restrictions relaxed and then abruptly re-tightened. In 2023, Closing Time lost an actress to illness in rehearsals.
Dyer’s re-mounted stagings for @sohoplace, on the same St George’s Cross set, with similar dynamic use of music and snap lighting changes but with scripts lightly updated, shows how fluidly the DOE plays embrace a changing social and political terrain.
There are references not only to Covid, Black Lives Matter and the 2021 Euros final, but to Gaza and current US politics. Delroy wonders why he has lost his job, reputation and contact with his girlfriend Carly (Michael’s sister) and their child due to a racist police action, while Donald Trump can run for president with 34 felonies to his name.
The exhilaration of DOE is that you never know where it’s going to go. Delroy offers ferocious justification for voting Leave (and “for Boris. Twice.”) Michael discovers his dad had a (not entirely convincing) secret life. The plays deal in grey areas, as well as black and white.
The tone, too, can shift from intense physicality or gutsy soliloquy to a bantering, music-hall interplay with the audience. Essiedu, with his sensitivity and charm, is particularly good at the latter, almost to the expense of his character’s integrity.
Raw, ungoverned, up-to-the-minute: this is exactly the kind of show the West End needs and increasingly welcomes. And this theatre feels like it was built for it.
