Theatre review: Death of England - Delroy

Back what was either five minutes or about twelve years ago depending on how time is passing, Clint Dyer and Roy Williams​' Death of England was a hit in the National's Dorfman; a major part of the conflicted, grieving Michael's monologue revolved around his black best friend Delroy, and the way his father treated him. Like everyone else in that story, Delroy got an unfiltered taste of how Michael felt about him in an eventful, coke-fuelled eulogy, but he also ended up hooking up with his lifelong crush, Michael's sister Carly. Although the original monologue was powerful and self-contained, it did also effectively set up its unseen supporting cast of characters enough that Rufus Norris commissioned a companion piece soon after it opened. The resulting sequel/spin-off Death of England - Delroy hasn't had the best of luck - original star Giles Terera got appendicitis but his hand-picked understudy Michael Balogun has ably taken over; only for the NT's post-lockdown return to fall victim to Lockdown 2: Here We Go Again, meaning tonight's official opening is also its closing night (it was filmed so people who'd booked for a cancelled performance can be offered a digital alternative.)

Jumping ahead two years from the funeral in Death of England, the bulk of Delroy takes place this year, not long before the first lockdown, when the day his first child is born becomes memorable for all the wrong reasons.

Finding out Carly has gone into premature labour, Delroy races across London to the hospital, but his run up an Underground escalator happens to look like he's running away from three policemen, who racially profile and arrest him. The mistake is discovered soon enough for him to be released and get to the hospital, but the damage has been done - in his fear, anger and frustration he's resisted arrest, sworn at the police and punched the walls of his holding cell, which somewhat spuriously add up to a genuine charge he'll have to go up before a judge for. And having already been reminded of how his race makes people treat him, when he does finally reach Carly the way she lashes out at him in her labour pains takes a particularly ugly and racial form, which finally breaks something in him.

Delroy offers up a mirror piece to the original (which I'm going to refer to as Michael now because... let's face it that's what it'll get retitled, when future revivals will be the two plays in rep) with a narrator probably not quite as unreliable as the first, but still one who's been forced to face things that have been building up inside him for years, and as a result is frequently reevaluating his own story as he tells it. The design team of Sadeysa Greenaway-Bailey and ULTZ from Michael also return, and do a good job of complementing that set in very different circumstances - to accommodate social distancing the Olivier is used, converted into the round and with a few perspex sheets for those scenes where Balogun needs to get a bit too close to the front rows. The stage is still a St George Cross but one made of paper that falls apart under Delroy's feet, and while the lack of intimacy means we can't have Delroy build up his world in shelves around the audience like Michael did, the resources of the National's largest auditorium mean we can have a couple of small coups de théâtre to introduce important props.

Delroy doesn't have the originality factor of two black writers seeing race from a white man's point of view (or being allowed to, which... shouldn't be an accurate way of phrasing that in this day and age but here we are,) but on the plus side doesn't have Michael's lurch into magical realism that I wasn't entirely convinced by. Plus it has an interesting take on the way language, and the differences in the way people from different backgrounds speak, can be used to discriminate and victimise, and it finds a new angle on the title Death of England, making it a kind of murder-suicide: Delroy voting for Brexit when he must have known he would be one of those worst-affected by it was the straw that broke his and Michael's relationship in the first play; here Delroy, perhaps retconning his memories of quite how conscious a decision this was, casts it as a deliberate attempt to help destroy the country that will never accept him completely. Mercifully, the writers haven't gone on too much of a tangent and turned this into a Covid play, but they have come up with a great little irony in Delroy being under house arrest with an ankle tag while everyone else is in the first lockdown. Powerfully written and performed, but the question now has to be, is Delroy the concluding part of a pair, or do Dyer and Williams have a Death of England - Carly in them?

Death of England - Delroy by Clint Dyer and Roy Williams has had to cancel performances in the National Theatre's Olivier, but plans for a digital alternative are due to be announced.

Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Normski.